Here are this year's picks. While some adults predicted that kids would immediately sniff out this program as a collection of word problems transparently disguised as a game about making a movie, the kids in our tests didn't feel that way at all. Not only was this their favorite math program but teachers reported that fourth through eighth graders who didn't even like the subject were absorbed and became more motivated to tackle their math homework. Kids' main complaint is that the music videos are kind of lame. This program might have been more deserving of the title Math for the Real World.
Students face real-world problems involving shopping, pizza, and, of course, teachers.
Kids can rotate a model of the Earth to examine its relationship to the sun, how it spins on an axis and rotates once per day, and how the sun's position in the sky changes from season to season. In the physics module, kids test principles of velocity, energy, and gravity by manipulating virtual ramps, catapults, and pendulums. In the natural-science sections, children learn how to identify different animals' tracks and make observations about their behavior, as well as noting the characteristics of natural objects and labeling them. You can adjust each activity's difficulty as needed. Kids choose the appropriate tools for digging, study the characteristics of dinosaur skeletons to deduce how they might have behaved, and learn how to classify them.