There are a lot of apps out there that look like they would help your child learn math fact fluency.\u00a0 If they have to answer math facts, won’t that work?\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 Just playing a game that asks you to answer facts won’t help you learn new facts.\u00a0 In fact, most apps for practicing facts are discouraging to students who don’t know their facts well.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because most of the people designing the app don’t have any experience teaching.\u00a0 A teacher, like the creator of the Rocket Math App<\/a>, is trained to effectively teach new math facts (or any facts) to a student and knows an effective math app from an ineffective one.<\/p>\n There are plenty of ineffective math apps.\u00a0 Some apps don’t give the answers when a student doesn’t know them.\u00a0 Some apps just fill in the answer for the student and then move on.\u00a0 When the student doesn’t know the answer, the app has to teach it.\u00a0 To teach math fact fluency, the app has to do these three things:<\/p>\n Without doing these three things there’s no way the app is going to be able to teach a new fact to the student.<\/p>\n Nobody can learn a bunch of new and similar things all at the same time.\u00a0 A person can only learn two, three, or four facts at a time. You cannot expect to learn more.*\u00a0 That’s enough for one session.\u00a0 The student has to practice those facts a lot of times to commit them to memory.\u00a0 Once or twice is not enough. It also won’t help to practice the same fact over and over.\u00a0 Proper math fact fluency practice intermingles new math facts along with facts the learner has already memorized.\u00a0 However, no more than two to four facts should be introduced at a time.\u00a0 If a student has to answer a lot of random untaught math facts, you will have a very frustrated learner.<\/p>\n Some students learn to solve addition problems by counting on their fingers.\u00a0 That’s a good beginner strategy, but students need to get past that stage. They need to be able to simply and quickly recall the answers to math facts. An app is good for developing recall.\u00a0 But the app has to ask students to answer the facts quickly, faster than they can count on their fingers.\u00a0 The app has to distinguish when a student is recalling the fact (which is quick) from figuring out the fact (which is slow).\u00a0 Second, the app must repeatedly ask the learned facts in a random order, so students are recalling.\u00a0 But the app should not throw in new facts until all the facts are mastered and can be answered quickly.<\/p>\n The trick to effectively teaching math facts is to introduce new math facts at an appropriate pace.\u00a0 If you wait too long to introduce math facts, it gets boring and wastes time.\u00a0 If you go too fast, students become confused.\u00a0 Before introducing new facts, students need to master everything you’ve given them.\u00a0 An effective app will test whether students have mastered the current batch of math facts before introducing more facts.\u00a0 And it will also introduce math facts at a pace based on student mastery.\u00a0 That’s the final piece of the puzzle to ensure students learn math facts from an app.<\/p>\n3 essential features of an effective math fact app<\/h2>\n
\n
The app has to tell the problem and the answer to the student.<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n
It has to ask the student to give the correct answer to the problem.<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n
It has to ask the problem again after a short delay to see if the student can remember the answer.<\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
An effective math app will only teach a few math facts at a time<\/h2>\n
Practice must focus on building math fact fluency<\/h2>\n
Introduce new facts only when old facts are mastered<\/h2>\n