The Kinds of Educational Applications Used to Address Automaticity/Math Fact Fluency

In my previous blog, I discussed the questions necessary to ask when selecting educational applications to meet students' goals and objectives. Today, we will examine the kinds of educational applications used to address automaticity/math fact fluency.


Students are required to be able to efficiently and accurately carry out procedures to sole computations (Dell,Newton, Petroff, 2012). This is referred to as having math automaticity. By 3rd grade, students need to know basic addition and subtraction math facts to build harder math computations in the future. This past Spring, I was in a third grade math class and I was amazed about the difficulty the students had with addition and subtraction especially subtraction with borrowing. Even with using the kid friendly methods of subtraction, the students struggled to understand the regrouping of the numbers moving from the tens to the ones column. This struggle made it hard for the students to understand multiplication and division facts especially division deriving from their struggle with subtraction. Here are a few great applications to promote automaticity/math fact fluency.

FASTT

 
This program assess students' knowledge of basic math concepts and then creates a program that is customized to their needs or teachers can customize the program if they already know the students. The customized activities improve  the memorization of fact and eliminate the need to rely on counting strategies to solve p
problems. The program generates reports of students progress.

Timez Attack

When I first read the title, I thought the program focused on telling time. However, the application was created by the same team that created Sony PlayStation games to engage students in a video  game like scene to practice multiplication. There is a version for a free download (click here) that is fully functional but there is a full version that has a few more games. I downloaded the application myself, today. With 3rd graders in the past, multiplication sometimes is a hard concept and I have struggled to find methods to help some learners fully understand. I think this program would catch their attention and keep them engaged in the learning. I am excited to let students practice multiplication in a fun and exciting way.

ArithmAttack

The students practice basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. The teacher is able to set the highest and lowest numbers to meet each student's individual needs. The program is offered as a free download or students may go this site to play the game without downloading.

Thanks for learning about different math  applications with me. Until Next Time!

  Reference: 

Dell, A.G., Newton, D.A, & Petroff, J.G. (2012). Assistive Technology in the Classroom. Boston: PEARSON.