Own Your Own Pizzeria
If your kids love pizza, they will adore the Motion Math: Pizza! app. As the owner of a pizzeria, kids get to design their own signature pizzas, shop for ingredients, set their prices, listen to their customers' suggestions and complaints, and then sell their pizzas. In the process of learning how to make their business profitable, they will use addition, multiplication, proportional thinking, and mental math.
How to Play
The game starts with a built-in tutorial that shows you how to buy ingredients from vendors, create your own pizzas, set pricing based on the cost of ingredients, and then sell the pies. A day of sales takes just a few minutes of tapping on customers to read their order and then putting in the correct amount of the sale on the cash register's keyboard. But if you don't calculate the cost of the pizzas fast enough, your customer will get frustrated and leave! At the day's end, players see sales numbers minus expenses; and their total sales are displayed on a bar graph. The goal is to run a profitable business for 30 days.
To keep this business simulation interesting over the 30 virtual days, the app slowly unlocks additional ingredients for the pizzas. Players can also spend their profits to buy upgrades to their restaurant -- such as signs -- in hopes of drawing in larger crowds. A second vendor will appear, selling ingredients, so players can comparative shop. Motion Math: Pizza! lets players know if they got the best deal and shows them why.
What Makes It Cool?
This well-designed business simulation places kids in their dream job: owning a pizza joint. It lets them experiment with creating different kinds of pizzas and setting prices. They learn about economics by trying different strategies and getting immediate feedback from their customers.
To keep things fun, Motion Math: Pizza! lets players create silly names for their pizzas. Your customers run the gambit from people to animals.
As kids run their businesses, they use math in a myriad of practical ways. They will do better in the simulation if they can add and multiply quickly. They will save money if they comparison shop and do the math to figure out the cost per ingredient. Here's the overall takeaway: Motion Math: Pizza makes it cool to be good at math.
Best For
Motion Math: Pizza works well with kids who love math, but it is also a great motivator for kids to whom math doesn't come easily. This game gives the latter a reason to go practice math facts.
This Motion Math: Pizza! app review was written by Jinny Gudmundsen.
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
