A week ago, I posted Motion Math’s announcement of their newest app, Hungry Guppy, a preschool precursor to their similar app, Hungry Fish. During that time, my youngest son – who has now begun kindergarten – and I have played Hungry Guppy and are here to delightedly report that it’s fun and educational.
The premise of the game is simple: a guppy can only eat bubbles or food that have a certain number. Your task is to feed the fish with food that contains only that number. If food is unavailable in that amount, you can drag food bubbles on top of other bubbles, and their sum is displayed. Dragging this to the guppy encourages it to eat and grow larger. As the game progresses, the displayed values move from single colored dots in traditional arrangements, to colored dots in varied arrangements, and numerals.
From the video above, I can attest it’s true to life. My son enjoyed it, played it for a surprisingly long time, and awoke one morning to play it again! Who wouldn’t invest $2.99 to see that from their children?
Additionally, from my professional expertise, both as a former math teacher and currently as a professional developer (with training on Common Core State Standards for Mathematics), I am highly impressed with how the developer was insightful enough to know that the pictures of the dots in the fish food should be in differing arrangements: for example, 4 dots should NOT always be 2 rows by 2 columns like on the face of a die but in multiple, random arrangements. Nicely done Motion Math, nicely done!
My son is already done with Hungry Guppy, and ready to go fishing with Hungry Fish. I’m not insinuating that Hungry Guppy was the reason (his dad is a former math teacher after all), but Hungry Guppy did help is identification and fluency with numerals and numbers! And given the disdain so many adults have for mathematics that they pass to their children, the youngest learners deserve to learn math as a fun experience!
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Motion Math: Hungry Guppy for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch is available for $2.99 at App Store.
Motion Math: Hungry Guppy was provided for review on iSource.com. For more information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: iPhone math games
