For the past month the younger members of the Fuelled by Latte team have been trialling a new app called Edplus which is available on the App Store, Google Play and Amazon Apps.
What is Edplus?
Edplus is an educational app designed to support children’s learning in school by giving extra practice at home in a fun way. You can choose from a range of topics (and not just maths and English!) but most excitingly the one all parents dread teaching their children – times tables – is free for everyone forever!
Edplus has been created by two clever chaps who are also dads. They understand that in order to get children to practice topics they may feel under-confident with they need an incentive, a reward. This app rewards children for practicing topics by giving them access to fun, familiar games. The incentive to practice is further achieved by showing the child’s progress on graphs so they can see how well they are getting on with mastering a subject.
It is worth spending some time as a parent learning all about the app in order to get the best out of it and you can’t just download the app and expect your child to understand what is going on. Luckily it is fairly simple and watching the walk through in the help section only takes a few minutes and summarises the app perfectly.
See What the App looks like here: You Tube Clip – Edplus
You can download the App here: https://edplus.app.link/fbl
Read on to find out more and see our Edplus App Review!
How Does the App Work?
Once you’ve downloaded the Edplus App you then add your childrens’ names so they each have an individual account. There are 5 areas to explore: Learning Section, Progress Screen, Play, Apps and Parent Zone.
The Learning Section is the primary area. Here children do daily practice questions, which only takes a few minutes and there are multiple choice answers. This earns them some gems as a reward. The gems are used to unlock the games in the Play section of the app. The more gems they earn, the more choice of games they have.
Before children are allowed to start playing a game you must answer a further 3 questions in the same format as the practice questions. The games on the app are short, mini-games that remind me of the simple games we used to play as kids. Between turns you will be given a few more questions to be able to continue. There are about 50 of these games and new ones are being added weekly.
The Progress Screen records your child’s progress towards mastery of a topic. It will also show you how accurate your child is at answering questions on that topic.
There are 3 further apps that are stand alone games and these can be downloaded from the app store. You can find out about these in the Apps section. The longer games are similar to the likes of Bejewelled Blitz and Puzzle Bobble, where each time you complete a game you move up a level. Within these games you must answer a question in order to make a move.
The Parent Zone on the app is where you can add new learners, monitor your child’s progress and add new topics to you app, if you wish.
How did we get on with it?
We gave the Edplus App to my 8 and 6 year old boys. They took to it straight away, enjoying the challenge of the topic questions and definitely enjoying the fun games! The recommended age for the Edplus App is 5+ as children need to be able to read the questions. This meant my 4 year old wasn’t able to use it on her own but she was really keen to try and enjoyed doing the French and Spanish topics when I read the questions aloud to her!
The Science topic is my eldest’s favourite and it has generated loads of discussion at home about the questions. Some of the areas covered he hasn’t studied at school yet, so it was great to see him being curious about new areas of the subject and asking us to about them. Because of this I would suggest the Science topic is better for KS2 children. Our eldest really enjoys playing Seal Saver, which is an additional app, as a reward.
My 6 year old prefers the times tables topic and he is swiftly progressing towards mastery, which is amazing given that he is in Year 1! It is a relief to find an educational app that he looks forward to playing and I also like that the questions are not all timed, giving him the chance to work out the less well known facts. His favourite game is one of the the additional apps, Planet Zorg.
As parents, we like seeing how much progress the children are making in the topics and that we can focus on areas they need to improve. For example, I really like the English topic which is based around building vocabulary. As a qualified primary teacher as well as a parent, I think this is a really important for children to develop their vocabulary by regularly practicing new words.
We decided to put the Edplus App on our iPhones along with the additional games: Planet Zorg, Match Shake and Seal Saver. We also put them on the boys’ android tablets. The icons don’t look like educational apps on their device and so they just consider them as games! I can see us continuing to use the Edplus app for a good while to come.
So how much does it cost?
The times tables topic is free as mentioned before. Each additional topic costs £4.99, if it is bought as a one-off purchase. Alternatively you can purchase all the topics by creating a month or annual subscription. The month subscription is £4.99 per month, and the annual subscription costs £29.99. For all subscriptions there is a free 3 day trial to see whether you like it.
You can download the App here: https://edplus.app.link/fbl
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AD / We were lucky enough to be invited to review the Edplus App, but all views and opinions are our own.
Yes we do not need our children to play some random games but can allow a small portion of their indoor time for them to play some educational ones. Thank you writer for writing about Edplus and it was a very informative read and I have installed it for my children in my phone. I tried it myself before I gave to them and I should say its something different.
This seems a great use of a phone/tablet, fun yet educational too!