MathTango: Grades K-5 Learning

One of the original educational games I got for my kids in pandemic lockdown that continues to hold their attention and teach them, 2.5 years later. My oldest was in Kindergarten in April 2020. He has happily moved on from the addition & subtraction tropical island to the multiplication & division section by 2nd grade. He became frustrated at school that they weren’t teaching multiplication yet in 2nd grade! He’s in 3rd grade now, happily learning division in Math Tango. Developers continue to make improvements, including a monster directory that people have requested in other reviews. It was getting hard to find specific monsters after your kid earned more than 30 monsters! I also like that after a certain number of missions, the island expands and adds more land—things can get crowded. My youngest, in 1st grade, has over 100 monsters and 3 land expansions. Developers reached the right balance between fun stuff unrelated to math and math “puzzles” to get the kids coming back for more. For 1st & 2nd grade, it makes more sense for my kids to play on Math Tango several times a week for 10-20 minutes than to do the common core homework workbook that the teachers never check. Just be aware if you’re homeschooling your kids, this can’t be the only source for math. Time, measurements, etc are not taught in this app.

We love, love, love this app!!! My younger son uses the addition/subtraction part and my older son has now graduated to the multiplication/division. There is an excellent balance of math puzzles and missions to keep them interested and coming back for more. They also love when they get to create their own monster. Our only frustration is when the mission requires them to find a specific monster or robot to do something with because once they have 20 or 30 plus monsters and/or robots it is very frustrating and time consuming (they are only allowed a set amount of time to play) trying to track down that specific creature. It would be extremely helpful if there was some kind of directory to at least look up what that monster looks likes so you know who you are looking for instead of just randomly touching monsters to hopefully happen upon the correct one.

My son and I love playing the puzzles together, but we end up having to turn it off as it is so frustrating. We are now several weeks in and have an island full of monsters (earned from activities). The island is totally crowded and then the daily missions/ tasks require you to find a specific monster before you can proceed. This requires you to spend lots of time touching every monster to see their name, and the game has bugs which means you can touch different monsters but the same monster name comes up. This can literally waste hours per week and drives us crazy, as the other aspects of this game are excellent. The way they do the math puzzles is as good as I have seen on any app but to progress you have to do the ridiculous time wasting tasks. E.g Find ‘any’ monster and put him on the trampoline is fine.....but when it says “find Terence, Rafael and Kondo, to complete a different activity with each one”.....you are going to waste an hour doing that. This could be an awesome app if it didn’t waste so much time. The bugs don’t help. So frustrating.