TRICKOMATICS

Guest Review by:

Jenny at Dapperhouse

I love to evaluate curriculum and programs for education. This one I am happy to say gets on old fashioned A+.

Trickomatics comes with a CD movie that should be watched before playing the games because it gets your child invested in the characters and gives a preliminary introduction to the main “tricks” included in the game CD.

My son and I watched the movie together… My son is a bit of a pre-teen cartoon connoisseur so I was comfortable with the fact that he wouldn’t “love” the movie, but he actually DID like it and watched it twice!

I had played them ahead of time so that I would know how to navigate the game and the individual problems before sharing it with my son. The one thing I got stuck on was in popping the balloons and getting the clues. There are boxes that show up in steps to solve the problems. You are to enter values (answers) in the boxes.

So for example, this picture has two empty boxes. I would enter both the answers in the available boxes, but the game would not recognize that I had done anything. I finally realized that you must do each box/each step one at a time and hit enter rather than fill in both/all at the same time. This makes perfect sense so that you learn the steps in the process. So when you pop a balloon for a hint, enter the answer in the first box, hit “enter” to check your answer, then move to the next and do the same.

After watching the movie a second time, I opened up the game.

I had him pick his own choices, play/solve a few and then pick another. They are not “games”. They are problems and learning how to solve them. It is a teaching tool, not like playing a traditional video game. BUT, it was still fun and interesting for my son.

He was having to re-learn how to solve problems with the new, easier strategies so there was a level of normal math frustration. Once he got the hang of the new “tricks” he was almost speechless about how simple solving difficult, multi-step problems with big numbers could be.

The tricks are not something that you can just teach a child and be done with it. This program is valuable because it keeps skills sharp and lets kids practice the strategies until they are fluent and fast.

Lastly, I LOVE that the game keeps track of the statistics of your child’s progress in the program so you can monitor and adjust the individual learning process specifically for each child!

This game comes with a recommendation of ages 7 – 11, but CLEARLY these strategies are Amazing and Beneficial and should be shared with children 7 through adult. I will be sharing this with my teens because I sincerely learned some valuable math skills from this program that will be helpful to him in high school, formal testing, college, and real life!

Get your free trial today and you will be as excited as I am about learning easy tricks to solve difficult math.

Jen’s Son’s Review:

“I loved the video. It was interesting and just from the video I learned a bunch of different math tricks… The animation is really good… The smartest characters are Chloe and Joey. Shmoey could only focus on eating! He is like me.

I think that this would be good for first and second graders for sure because that is when you learn place value, but I am going to be in fourth grade and I learned new tricks to make math easier. The tricks make it easy and on the game when you get the hints it makes it look like the pre-algebra we do at school. The eleven’s trick confused me at first but then once I learned it, I think it is like a real trick!

I think that it is worth it to get Trickomatics to be better and faster at math, and kids would like it.”