Math Basics: Practice & Learn

Math Basics now teaches factoring. Open Numbers and Factoring sits alongside Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division and Fractions, with five games that build on one another. Divisibility Rules comes first. Your child chooses one divisor, anywhere from 2 to 13, then answers yes or no about number after number, so a rule that has not stuck gets a whole session instead of one question in nine. Prime Factors puts a number and every prime on screen together and asks which of them go in. Build the Number works backwards, multiplying prime tiles up to hit a target exactly. Factor Tree splits a number into two factors, over and over, until every branch ends in a prime. The tree grows as your child works, and the first number stays where it was written. For the child meeting a tree for the first time, a question-mark button on the how-to-play strip opens a worked example that builds itself: 12 splits into 3 and 4, the 3 fills in because it is prime, and the 4 splits into 2 and 2. Factor Ladder is the same work set out as a column, dividing down to 1. A wrong answer explains itself. For a divisibility question the rule is stated first, in one sentence, then run on that very number, digit by digit, and only then does the card say what the result means. Where a divisor has more than one rule in circulation, as 4, 7, 8, 11 and 13 all do, a switch at the top swaps the whole explanation, so your child is never shown one method blurred into another. Why a rule works at all is one tap away, for the child who wants it. In Build the Number and Factor Tree, the card replays the multiplication your child actually built, lands it next to the target and names the factor that is still missing. In the tree, a first factor that does not go in is answered with its divisibility rule instead, so the two halves of a split are corrected as the different mistakes they are. Chika's trick shows its working. Ask whether a number divides by 7 and the card cuts the last digit away, multiplies it by 5, and slides the answer underneath what is left before adding the two together. The same runs for 13, where the last digit is multiplied by 4 instead. If the result is still too big to judge, it goes round again, with each finished round folded onto a single line above. And in Prime Factors, where a single answer decides six questions at once, the card now covers all of them: every prime your child missed, and every prime they tapped by mistake, gets a row of its own. Tapping a row opens the full explanation for that prime and closes the others. Every number these games ask about is assembled so that it can be factored with the rules your child already knows. Your child never has to guess. Factoring counts everywhere the rest of the app does. Sessions appear in the parent statistics under their own name, a daily goal of ten factoring questions can be set just like one for addition, and a new Prime Hunter award arrives at fifty questions answered. We also fixed two crashes at launch and one that could happen while a sound was playing, plus other bug fixes and improvements.