We have been in serious need of some math facts practice here. That’s why I was so excited to receive Math Rider as a review product. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are hard and boring enough when you are young so I’ve been on the lookout for ways to make this chore more pleasant since my oldest was at this stage.
When I first installed the Math Rider program and we started playing with it, my younger son (age 7) had more difficulty then his sister because he had almost no experience using the keyboard numbers. Within Math Rider you are actually a character riding a horse and completing various quests for the greater good of the people. Your horse responds to the speed at which you type the answer to each problem as it appears on the screen and his errors or slowness resulted in his horse stopping so Caleb got a little frustrated. It only took him a few days to catch on though, and his big sister helped by demonstrating that it could be done.
When you add a new user to Math Rider, you can select the level of difficulty and the type(s) of operations you want your child to practice. You can go back and change this at any time. I started Caleb at medium difficulty to correspond with where he was in his math textbook and quickly had to change him to the easy level because of his unfamiliarity with the keyboard. This has turned out to work well because he needed practice on those easier facts to gain confidence.
I try to have Anna and Caleb work on Math Rider daily. When they login, they are allowed to practice, or begin/continue a quest. Both of them preferred to jump right into the quests. Each quest is a different story line and your child has to complete the quest with a certain level of accuracy to finish the quest. The quests in Math Rider are interesting and fun, so they work well to hold the attention of my kids. The eventual goal is to finish every quest at every level with 100% accuracy, and it is possible to start a quest again after you finish it.
My Bottom Line: Both of my children have been steadily improving in speed and accuracy with this software. I’m really excited to have the software and they both enjoy doing Math Rider daily as part of their “school”.
Math Rider is available as an instant download for $47 and is appropriate for anyone who needs help memorizing their math facts. You can have multiple users using the software.
