Math Apps for Building Spatial and Reasoning Skills

We recently took a look at spelling apps, recommending those that we think do the best job of providing critical orthographic skills while being fun and engaging. Today, we turn our attention to math apps we think are worth investigating.

Carstens Studios designs, creates and illustrates dynamic learning applications for young children. Daren Carstens, the owner of Carstens Studios, shares that his goal for each app is to inspire the love of math in children by giving them a new way to conceptualize mathematical concepts. Math requires spatial and sequential understanding, as well as a great deal of reasoning and logical thinking skill. 

There are an abundance of tools for building foundational numeracy and sequential skills. However, it can often be a challenge to find dynamic ways to build a child’s spatial understanding or reasoning skill. Carstens Studios offers a variety of fun, engaging tools that help students build their spatial understanding of math while encouraging reasoning and problem solving. We have detailed some favorite apps below that would add value to any math curriculum.

Math Doodles

In the introduction to this app, Mr. Carsten shares that when he was in school, math just looked like squiggles to him, leaving his mind to wander and him to doodle on the edge of his notebook. He soon realized that there were places for doodles in math, and that doodling helped him better understand the mathematical concepts. Building on this notion, each game in the Math Doodles app gives players choices for displaying the numbers in different ways (as words, Roman numerals, currency, etc.). Furthermore, each math puzzle encourages students to experiment while developing and strengthening their strategy and problem solving skills. Math Doodles builds a wide range of critical math skills, including building basic mathematical and number sense, as well as teaching basic operations, time, money and geometric concepts.

Attributes

It is true that math is more than numbers. It takes more to master math than merely mastering numeracy skills. Mr. Carstens states that, “The key to understanding math is understanding patterns.” Therefore, the Attributes app is comprised of a series of seven games, designed to challenge kids' mathematical thought processes through tables, patterns, and the concepts of attributes. The games help late-elementary children develop the abstract reasoning skills required in higher-level math. By playing the Attributes games, students will build their understanding of pattern sequences, Venn diagrams, logic, and classification.

Symmetry Shuffle 

As we have mentioned, spatial reasoning is an important element of mathematics, especially in geometry. The mathematical puzzle Symmetry Shuffle,allows students to explore line and rotational symmetry while developing their spatial sense. Through the game student will build her understanding of slides, flips and rotations of two-dimensional shapes, as well as the concepts of congruence, similarity and symmetry.

We can’t go into detail on every resource, but Carstens Studios has other apps that are also worth noting. So, if you are looking to provide students with extra addition and subtraction practice, check out Unknown Square, Sum Stacker or Connect Sums. Each of the apps has received numerous accolades and awards. But their biggest achievement is that they truly make math learning fun.

Sharing History and Theater with Students

At The Yellin Center, we emphasize that there are many ways to learn and to express knowledge.  Twenty thousand New York City eleventh graders are about to experience education in a new and exciting way.  These students, all from schools with high percentages of low-income families, are going to learn about American history with the help of some Broadway multi-sensory aids.  Producers of the new musical Hamilton, about the revolutionary figure by the same name, have paired with the Rockefeller Foundation to finance student tickets to the show.  The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History plans to create a curriculum to go along with this Broadway experience, with materials to include primary documents from the era depicted in the musical.  Students will have the opportunity to develop and share their own artistic responses.

From the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery

 Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and now stars in Hamilton, was once a New York City student himself.  He told The New York Times, “If we can excite curiosity in students, there’s no telling what can happen next.”  We agree.

Spelling Apps

Spell with Pip

It seems that these days there is an app for everything. So much so that it can cause any parent or teacher’s head to spin when trying to find tools for a specific need. However, when doing a little investigation into spelling apps, I found I kept coming up short. There were a lot of resources out there, but not all of them were robust enough to build critical orthographic skills. There are a variety of fun, engaging games available, but many tended to lack the educational vigor required to build skills or provide needed interventions. 

Regular practice is key for building spelling skills. It is equally important to provide students with fun, motivating ways to practice these skills. We don’t want literacy learning to hinge exclusively on spelling tests and worksheets. With that in mind,  I have chronicled a few of the strong, game-based digital tools that help students practice their spelling skills
. 
Spelling Monster is an app that allows kids to practice spelling words with fun interactive games. The stats section of the app will let parents or teachers know how long a child is practicing and where they might need extra help. Soon, teachers will have the ability to upload their own personalized spelling lists. Educators will then be able to set objectives and get alerts and weekly reports when students meet their goals.

Spell with Pip is an interactive spelling game created by the makers of the Oxford dictionary. The game gradually gets more difficult as children progress through the levels. The game includes a personal dictionary, and focuses on words that children commonly find hard to spell. The added benefit that I find immensely helpful as a Canadian teacher working in America, is that the games can be offered in either US or UK English. That means whether you spell it “realize” or “realise”, this game has you covered.

Word Domino is a game that allows children to build words with the proposed syllable tiles. The game can be played in single or multi-player versions, which is a great way for students to build their recognition of letter patterns. There is a vocal synthesis function where words are spoken once they are found, which can reinforce sight word recognition also.

Word Domino

New Study Looks at How Brains Multi-Task

Scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center have just announced new research findings that may help explain how our brains focus attention on specific tasks and filter out distracting or unimportant information, a process often referred to as "saliency determination."

As reported by NYU Langone, senior study investigator and neuroscientist Michael Halassa, MD, PhD. noted, 

“Our latest research findings support a newly emerging model of how the brain focuses attention on a particular task, using neurons in the thalamic reticular nucleus as a switchboard to control the amount of information the brain receives, limiting and filtering out sensory information that we don’t want to pay attention to. Filtering out distracting or irrelevant information is a vital function. People need to be able to focus on one thing and suppress other distractions to perform everyday functions such as driving, talking on the phone, and socializing.”

The researchers also noted the interaction of the thalamic reticular nucleus and the prefrontal cortex of the brain in controlling how the brain multi-tasks. The prefrontal cortex has long been known to control executive functions - organization, focus, and other behaviors that impact day to day functioning. The study looked at how mice were able to respond to stimuli when their prefrontal cortex was inactivated, which disrupted TRN neural signaling. When this occurred, the mice were not able to block out distracting stimuli and find a reward of milk.

Certainly, this research has a way to go before it fully explains how this process works in humans. But it may be a huge next step in explaining the brain issues underlying attention deficit and executive function disorders.

Halloween BINGO

Halloween is just around the corner, so we want to share a fun, easy game to play with the kids. It can be played at home in a small group, or at school with the whole class. BINGO is a classic game, and the rules are pretty straightforward. We have, however, included step-by-step instructions to help you brush up on the game play basics. The complete set of game cards can be downloaded, for free, here. There are five different game boards available. We hope you enjoy your Halloween!

Materials Needed

• One bingo card per child
• Materials to mark the bingo cards (e.g. candy, tokens or crayons)
• One set of teacher/parent game pieces

Preparation

• Print out enough game cards so that each player has one
• Gather any markers, chips or candy needed to mark the squares
• Teacher/parent cuts out their game pieces along the dotted line

Directions

• Teacher/parent draws a card and calls it out to the students
• It is helpful to show younger children the picture, in case they aren’t familiar with the Halloween words. In a classroom setting, a projector or smart board works well for this
• Children look at their game card and locate the picture. They then cover the picture if they find it
• First person to complete a row of five (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) wins!
• Alternate way to win: Play blackout, where the entire board must be covered to win

Assessing a College's "Value"

Any good liberal arts college will encourage students to understand that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. This key component of critical thinking is what explains why ice cream consumption does not cause drowning, even though both tend to increase at the same time of year - in the summer.

However, it seems that this principle is often being overlooked in evaluating the colleges our society relies on for teaching students how to think critically. The U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard provides in its rankings database, among other information, median earnings of graduates. A recent New York Times article notes that this promotes a causation-for-correlation confusion, and that a particular institution’s direct impact on future earnings cannot be assumed.

Confounding factors include admissions selectivity and the fact that students at expensive universities often come from privileged backgrounds, which also correlates with high earnings. Colleges also vary in their focus on particular fields, some of which are more high-paying than others, thereby impacting the average when earnings of graduates across fields are evaluated as a whole.

There are many ways to assess a college’s value. Graduate earnings are just one of them, and even if this is the variable used, it must be interpreted with great caution.

DIY Professional Development for Adult Learners

Here at The Yellin Center we don’t just work with learners in the K-12 demographic. We do a lot with adult learners who are currently in college, professional school (especially medical students as part of our work with New York University School of Medicine) and even working professionals. We help develop learning plans that will help them to succeed in their higher academic and professional lives. We assist by linking them to resources and developing the strong learning strategies they need to excel in their chosen field. However, outside of the brick and mortar structure of traditional education, it can be hard for mature learners to figure out how to master the important professional skills they need to get ahead in the workforce. 

DIY Professional development is the new buzzword in adult education, and aims to allow learners to take control of their learning on their own time. EdCamps, whose target audience is often teachers, are springing up to teach valuable skills. There are also a wealth of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course), such as those by edX or Coursera, available from many universities and professional organizations that span disciplines. If you are looking to build technical skills you can take part in a coding boot camp or self-teach through online learning platforms, such as Code Academy or Khan. If you are looking to brush up your language skills you can take a free course with Duolingo. Peer-to-Peer learning environments, such as Skillshare, are also gaining traction, which allow trained professionals to share their skill set with eager learners. The 21st century online learning format is empowering learners to determine what they need to master, and tailor how and when to learn it so that it integrates with their busy lives. 

One of my favorite resources out there is Lynda.com, a website that uses a flipped classroom model and video modeling to teach and train professional learners. According to their website, Lynda.com helps members “stay ahead of software updates, pick up brand-new skills, switch careers, land promotions, and explore new hobbies.” Lynda.com houses a vast, ever growing course catalog that spans topics from tech skills to creative design to business acumen. Since it is a cloud-based library, courses can be accessed 24/7 from any device, providing learners with the flexibility to learn on their own schedule. Each course is taught by recognized industry experts who work in the fields they are teaching about, so you know the content is up to date and relevant. I particularly find being able to take training notes a very valuable asset. Several White Papers have been published that explore the research and merits and benefits of learning with Lynda.com.

Learning isn’t restricted to the classroom anymore. With an internet connection and mobile devices you can access skills training for nearly any skill set from any location.