Educational Software Review Assignment Finito

RESULTS
After careful consideration I chose to review Mathville Jungleway and Math Strategies Primary for the purpose of this assignment. Both pieces of software have been developed with primary school aged children in mind: Jungleway is meant for children in grades 1-3 and Math Strategies for children in K-3. I thought it would be interesting to compare two math games aimed at children in the same age group.

Jungleway was a complete disappointment: boring, confusing at times and outdated. Math Strategies on the other hand was age appropriate, engaging and worthy of including in a classroom.

At first glace I assumed Jungleway was for older students because of the lack of auditory direction. A voice provided some prompts such as how to begin the game and provides brief explanations of what the goal is for each activity but there is no specific direction provided. I'm a grown woman and I struggled to figure out what was expected of me in some of the activities. While playing a few of the Jungleway's games I was unsure of whether or not the buzzing sound was telling me whether my answer was right or wrong; it was only by keeping track of my score that I was able to decipher when I had made an error.

Math Strategies provided clear instructions in both print and speech. Clear and instant feedback was provided when I answered questions and never was there any doubt as to whether or not I was on the right track.

Although some curriculum expectations are addressed by Jungleway it would certainly not be something I would incorporate into my classroom, nor would I recommend the software to parents looking for additional math tools to use with their children at home.

Math Strategies Primary is a program that I certainly would recommend to others. Many curriculum expectations from the number sense and numeration strand are addressed within this program and a variety of onscreen manipulatives including, but not limited to, number lines and ten frames provide the user with additional support.

DISCUSSION
In order to test these two pieces of software I spent some time playing with them. I spent at least an hour with Math Strategies Primary and only thirty minutes playing with Jungleway. My intention had been to play with each program for an equal amount of time but time moved far too slow while I fumbled my way through Jungleway; after just fifteen minutes I was ready to give up but I forced myself to keep playing.

Only a few activities kept my attention long enough to complete them in Jungleway, the games were neither fun nor terribly engaging. I would certainly not include this program on my classroom computer if I had the choice.

It would definitely be viable to use Math Strategies Primary in the grade one classroom I am currently spending time in. The cartoon chipmunk host(ess) would appeal to both boys and girls as would the various games found in this software. Unfortunately I was unable to test the teacher functions on my demo program so I cannot comment on how useful the teacher control function is. It appears as if the teacher can control what activities are presented to students and if this is actually the case it would be beneficial.

I do not see any issues with the Math Strategies Primary software; of course even with the excellent auditory component some of the grade one students would struggle with using this program therefore I would have students work in pairs. Unfortunately we only have one classroom computer so there would be limited opportunities for students to access this program. The class does have weekly computer lab visits but I am not sure that I would want to have my students spending those few golden moments of computer time playing math games when we could be doing other things.

The two evaluation tools I used for this assignment were the class generated page and Kathy Schrock's review. I found the class evaluation questions to be much more thorough than Schrock's. Schrock's is a simple check system that takes little time to complete, which was great, but the questions are not specific enough for my liking. What I did like about Schrock's evaluation was the 'General Information' section; this information is definitely worth including on an evaluation.

RECOMMENDATIONS
I think the class evaluation tool could be improved by including the general information asked for on Kathy Schrock's review page. Besides that I think the tool could be left as is; the categorized statements along with the rating scale are easy to use and cover all of the important aspects of software evaluation. I think that overall we did an excellent job in the creation of our class tool.