TouchCounts 4+

Tangible Arithmetic

Nathalie Sinclair

Designed for iPad

    • 4.4 • 9 Ratings
    • Free

iPad Screenshots

Description

TouchCounts lets children use their fingers, eyes and ears to learn to count, add and subtract. By tapping and swiping and by using specially-designed gestures for adding and subtracting, children create and manipulate their own numbers, developing a stronger number sense as they explore the mathematical foundations of ordinality, cardinality, and arithmetic.

As children begin to learn how to count with their fingers, TouchCounts is the perfect environment to solidify that learning and help them generalize beyond their fingers, “going past ten” into the endless world of larger values. TouchCounts allows children to focus on both ordered and operational views of numbers, inviting them to develop their number sense by creating and exploring coordinated number sequences tactilely, visually, symbolically and verbally. In addition, learners can explore how numeric quantities can be composed from–and decomposed into–other, smaller quantities.

Neither a repetitive drill-and-practice worksheet nor an rigid "level-driven" game, TouchCounts is a mathematics exploration environment designed to allow students to discover, pose and examine their own questions and understandings. Sample activities on the TouchCounts website show parents and teachers how TouchCounts can support learners' conceptual understanding of:

- number naming
- counting and skip-counting
- ordinality and cardinality
- even and odd numbers
- less-than, greater-than and equal-to relationships
- subitization
- addition, subtraction, and the foundations of division and multiplication.

Based on contemporary research understandings of how children learn mathematics, and developed by the Tangible Mathematics Learning Project in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, TouchCounts is intended for use in school, pre-school and at home; and with small groups, with 1:1 pairings of a learner and a parent or teacher, or individually.

What’s New

Version 2.0

TouchCounts 2.0: 
* The Operations World now supports equipartioning (introduction to division). Drag apart any number with multiple fingers to split it into multiple equal-sized parts.
* Settings now supports Image Capture and White Background, for better documentation and research purposes
* TouchCounts can now speak German (available in Settings)

Ratings and Reviews

4.4 out of 5
9 Ratings

9 Ratings

DScher ,

A Novel and Compelling Approach to Developing Number Sense

It's rare to find a math app that leverages the multitouch capabilities of the iPad in a pedagogically meaningful way, but TouchCounts succeeds brilliantly in creating a tactile environment for young children to explore counting, addition, and subtraction. The premise is simple: Each finger tap of the iPad's screen increases the count by one, with children receiving immediate visual feedback (the appearance of the numbers 1, 2, 3, ...) along with accompanying audio (the numbers read aloud). Children soon discover that there's no need to limit their counting to ones. Tapping eight fingers simultaneously, for example, leapfrogs the count by 8, and repeated taps of 8 generate the skip-counting sequence 8,16, 24, 32... This is just one example of how fundamental mathematical concepts arise naturally and concretely through children's play with the app. A second mode of the app operates similarly, but now children can push numbers together to add them and split numbers apart with their fingers to subtract. As a mathematics educator jaded by the flood of mediocre math apps, I was delighted by the novelty of this approach and believe that TouchCounts has tremendous potential for helping children develop number sense.

App Privacy

The developer, Nathalie Sinclair, has not provided details about its privacy practices and handling of data to Apple. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

No Details Provided

The developer will be required to provide privacy details when they submit their next app update.

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