Pick Math Missions For Great Math Activities for Children
What is great about coming up with a program of math activities for children is that, often, the child learns without actually realizing that she is learning. Consider as an example, the math software for children by Scholastic called Math Missions Grades 3-5: The Amazing Arcade Adventure. The envionment of the game is a cartoon neighborhood called Spectacle City, founded by Horton Spectacle. As hard as the city’s honest citizens try to turn the city into the greatest in the world, Randall Underling the villain, wants more than anything to stop them. The problem that these funny citizens face is that no one in the town seems to know any math at all. Players need to step in to help everything happen in the city; and most of the time, the kind of help needed in any situation is mathematical.
Even at first glance, Math Missions excels as a colorful and entertaining environment for a child to compete in, and it features lots of really clever little math activities for children. The more participating players help in the building of the city, the more money they earn. As soon as a child earns enough, she can use this seed money to invest in the city’s arcade and actually come to own it. Becoming an owner isn’t an empty and grandiose exercise at all. Children make business decisions about how it is run, advertise and keep track of profits. Right away, children get drawn into the whole earning activity, and play hard to make enough money to make it happen. They just don’t realize how good they are getting their math, is all.
As soon as a child signs in and plays for the first time, she chooses a level of challenge out of the three available. Most of the time, the game appeals to a fourth grader much better than it would appeal to a toddler. After all this trouble, it would be disappointing if all that happened was that the child was run through a few basics. But that is simply not the case. If anything, Math Missions leans a touch in the direction of the difficult.
The game features a store called MegaBuyts that helps the child work with tasks like understanding graphs. In the sporting goods store, they learn to pick uniforms for the members of a team based on personal preferences and size, and in the grocery store they learn how to eyeball things to correctly pick containers for stuff. Of course, every one of these math activities for children needs them to take the subway or the bus to get to where the activity is, and that requires them to make change, a math activity in itself.
This is an environment that’s full of great surprises around every corner. There are magicians, treasure hunts, cartoon characters, you name it. Not only do kids get to manage their own store, they also get to save the town in the process. Everything feels fresh and new in the game, and there is enough entertainment to balance out the education. As a game with math activities for children, this one really wins all around.