By helping store clerks in the financially-troubled Spectacle City with their real world math problems, kids earn enough money to open their own arcade business. And of course, due diligence requires that they play all the games to make sure they are fun!
With this clever premise, Scholastic has created a top-notch math game for elementary-age children. The store clerks are hip, but uniformly lousy in math. So players become math wiz-kids and go from business to business solving problems. For example, at the electronics store, they use their math acumen to read graphs and charts. Youngsters will also be asked to help with fractions, decimals, money, measurement, patterns, time, geometry, and much more.
There is much to like about this software on so many different levels. Not only do kids perform real world math with the store clerks, but they use math reasoning to run their arcade and complete several mini-missions that appear throughout the game. The program facilitates the math learning by providing help in the form of video tutoring, a math glossary, and where appropriate, onscreen math manipulatives. And the difficulty leveling is sophisticated, because it adjusts up or down depending on how the child is performing.
This software is a winner—let those arcade businesses prosper!
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
