5
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Crazy Times Tables-Multiplication Photo Fun App Review

App Info

Price: $2.99

Overview

Crazy Times Tables incentivizes multiplication facts practice with games and visual effects. The app provides several levels of difficulty with twelve games and users can isolate specific fact families (x 1 through x 12) or set up for mixed practice. It also isolates math facts that were incorrectly answered and allows practice just on that list.

Features include:

  • 12 games graduated in difficulty level
  • Fascinating photo and other visual effects add interest
  • Choice of working with fact families (x1 through x12), mixed practice or individualized difficult facts
  • Games mimic popular video game formats
  • Instant feedback and star-based reward system to open new games

Quality

Crazy Times Tables is a very high-quality app. Developers did a great job of incorporating variety and challenge into the games, and each works well.  The illustrations and animations are simple, yet enjoyable. Use of the app is intuitive, so there is virtually no learning curve to understand how to play.

Education

Crazy Times Tables will help most students memorize their basic multiplication facts. The developers did an outstanding job of creating a scaffolded learning system that supports students at all ability levels. Students can choose the level of multiplication facts with which they wish to work, from the x1 family through the x12 family. New practice games are opened through usage, but an adult can unlock everything at once if desired. The first game goes over the facts and their answers. The middle nine games present three choices for answers to the presented fact. Some of the later games are timed such that students need to respond quickly in order to keep playing. The last two games to unlock present facts with missing multipliers and facts where students must generate the answers. One game even shows a multiplication table and highlights the entire sequence of answers for the whole fact family once the correct answer is selected.

Each of the activities is responsive, presenting easier facts first and gradually moving to more difficult ones when the student responds accurately.  In addition, the app has provision for mixed practice, so more advanced students can work with all facts at once instead of within single fact families. Finally, and perhaps the most unique feature is that the app keeps track of errors and adds them to a “tricky facts” list.  Students can choose to work just with those combinations to memorize them.

Entertainment

Crazy Times Tables is highly entertaining for young and middle elementary students. The app rewards accurate work by giving stars for the effort, and collecting stars will unlock new games to try.

However, this app’s true entertainment genius lies in its visual entertainment. When students sign in, they snap a picture of their faces. This picture is embedded into each activity in various ways. The opening screen shows this individualized character with a goofy hat. When you tap it, it changes position such that if you tap it rapidly, it performs quite a dance.  Within each game, the photo is embedded into the action, as well.  For example, one game features a dog catching Frisbees with the correct answer on them. The student’s face is superimposed on the dog, with hilarious results. In another game, the student’s face is used as a clown head with a mouth that opens to “eat” correct answers.

Value

Crazy Times Tables costs $2.99 in the App Store and will be likely to coax your child or students into hours of productive practice on memorizing multiplication facts. It is even possible to set up multiple student accounts. It’s a great value.

Child Friendliness

This app is very child friendly. There are no outside links for children to stumble into inadvertently. It is fairly easy for young users to make changes to accounts and to unlock all games (they need to enter an adult birth year), but those do not present any kind of danger to kids.

  • Parent area (protected access to settings)
  • NO external links
  • NO social media
  • NO in-app purchase
  • NO 3rd party ads
Crazy Times Tables-Multiplication Photo Fun
Crazy Times Tables
Crazy Times Tables is one of the most perfect multiplication fact practice apps available. It offers repetition and choice of facts made enjoyable by creative and visually interesting special effects.
Quality
Education
Entertainment
Value
Child Friendly
5
Where to Buy