Lower Primary Maths

"Making Maths attractive - a mother’s experience in using media rich learning resources" – an article by our employee, describing her experience with our new Courses for Lower Primary Maths, is featured in the latest "Media & Learning News". – a Media in Education Newsletter. This newsletter is aimed at people actively engaged in promoting excellence in the use of media in education and is linked to the annual MEDEA Awards and Media & Learning Conference.

Making Maths attractive - a mother's experience in using media rich learning resources by Jola Galecka

Jola Galecka works for Young Digital Planet, and she is also a mother of 2 young boys. Jola has described what it was like trying out our new courses for Lower Primary Maths which are based on the successful Finnish textbook "Laskutaito" and which include a range of interactive materials as well as personalised characters designed to guide students through the course. The series is designed to teach mathematical concepts, skills and terms in real life situations.

Jola: Since I have always been interested in making my children fall in love with Maths I was very excited about trying out these new materials with my own boys. To begin with, there were only few digital lessons available so I was really pleased when they asked me whether I had any more of that ‘fun math'. It turned out that the audio instructions and the feedback from the guiding characters, together with the ability to check the answers and to show them up ahead basically replaced my involvement in the whole process. All those features substituted for my interacting with them which made all the difference to working with books alone.

Eventually I brought home enough lessons to satisfy the boys for over a week. I was a bit disappointed at first that my older son had some problems as I thought the level was far too low for him to begin with. However it turned out that the way the activities were prepared was different to what he had been used to. He was not used to such independent ways of working: the instructions were different, they did not say exactly what he should do, but rather expected him to draw his own conclusions. Sometimes the picture or drawn instructions were playing a crucial part, which he could not figure out at all at first.

My younger son did not struggle as much with the concepts and the way he was supposed to figure out the solution to the exercise. He found it all engagingly challenging and he loved getting the animated incentives at the end of the activity and the gifts at the end of the lesson. He enjoyed changing the guiding characters and choosing the emoticons.

I made an additional experiment: I gave some of the "tricky" (meaning different from what I had seen the boys doing at school) exercises from level 1A to my older son to figure out and he could not solve what my 7 year old had already figured out completely on his own. That made me think. I realised, that the difference between the boys was purely the amount of time they had spent in the regular school. It is the school's approach to teaching maths, that had killed certain aspects of divergent thinking in my older son. I became determined to continue "Lower Primary Maths" with my boys. And I was rewarded with ... having to call them for dinner 3 or 4 times "Just a moment Mom, I am almost done... can I finish this one, please?"