After chatting with my 6-year-old about balancing screen time and how it can affect our eyes and brains, it was time to introduce some apps and games for her to try. The device we are using is a 7″ Amazon Fire tablet which we have only been using to watch Netflix when we are traveling. It does not have a case for holding or standing which could be a problem when she needs to use one of her hands to operate the games. However, for this introduction, her lap and knees sufficed as props to hold up the tablet whilst in use. The first app we tried was a math app called Prodigy which she currently uses at school. We used her school log-in codes so she could continue her progress from school at home. This tablet is slow so starting the games and loading took a few minutes. Once we were in she was able to get started in a game.
At first, she was very excited to play the battle games and chose the world in which she had been playing at school (I did not understand the world concept but it didn’t seem to matter to the game). The battle-type game reminded me of Pokémon battles as you use different “powers” to defeat other characters. This part of the game was much more exciting for her and what she was looking forward to. The math questions are all text-based so she needed me to read them to her to understand how to answer them. There is a button for it to read the question out loud but we couldn’t get it to work. The first set of questions was addition to 20, which she knows but we used her fingers and mine to get the answers. The next set of questions was measurement and whether the image was longer or shorter. The third set of questions was about counting sporadic placed and coloured dots which confused her and was frustrating to complete. She needed an adult to sit with her to complete the questions and this is not something she could do independently.
She played well with my engagement for 45 minutes but did get upset when I said that our time was up. We returned the next day but the experience was very different as she lost the same battle multiple times with the characters. This created a big upset and we almost had the tablet flung across the room in frustration. Later I tried to talk about it and how we could pick another world to battle in but she has was resistant and has not wanted to try the game since. Overall the game is exciting but I feel like it is the battle concept that children would like and the math questions are an afterthought to appease adults. Upon reflection, this tablet is too small to see the written text and I recommend using a larger screen. I definitely will try other math apps as in terms of learning I would say this program provides minimal learning opportunities and is just a battle game in disguise.