DoodleMaths

What is DoodleMaths?

DoodleMaths is a programme with which many parents and teachers will be familiar and children will have used. DoodleMaths is a maths programme that builds the confidence of 4-14 year olds by providing a personalised work programme tailored to children’s individual strengths and weaknesses.

DoodleMaths is now fully aligned to the US common core standards and UK curriculum.

What's it about?

DoodleMaths mantra is "little and often". Children are prompted to complete a short selection of tasks each day. These cover various topics and, following a short assessment task, are chosen to keep your child's knowledge fresh and to address weaknesses.  

Parents and teachers can both be linked with each child's account allowing them to monitor and influence the progression through the app's challenges. Either a downloadable app or a web-based service is used to do so. In these, you can allocate extra exercises to children that concentrate on a specific maths topic. This mixes the best of both worlds: the constant tailoring to the individual's ability made by the app and a teacher's professional knowledge.

The questions themselves are clear and well designed. The method of answering them is both natural and pleasingly variable too.  Items are sorted into groups, pairs are matched, numbers keyed in and markers dragged into position. It is good to see this app is not just limited to multiple-choice questions - as so many others are.

Each question has some useful options for getting extra support. A hint gives a short prompt to help children to start off their thinking. A fuller explanation can also be brought up. In both cases, these are in written and spoken form so that a child's literacy ability need not hold back their numeracy progression. Two final options let children send a short message to their teachers and parents asking for help. These appear pre-populated with the exact question so that children do not risk explaining themselves poorly and thus receiving a less useful reply.

The use of synthesised speech in the app rather than a recorded narration has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it reduces the amount of storage that the app would otherwise take up on each device.  It is also more flexible meaning the app can provide more narrated questions, hints, and explanations.  

On the downside, it has a slightly robotic quality, although much less so than many other implementations of speech synthesis. Finally, it can occasionally be somewhat too literal. The question "£5 - 63p - £_" is spoken as "five pounds minus sixty-three p = pound symbol". For some children this will be no more than an easily ignored quirk, for those looking for any distraction from the work at hand, this sort of thing can be an issue.  

How will students benefit?

DoodleMaths empowers all learners to achieve confidence in maths. Positive language and help along the way create a safe environment for learning with DoodleMaths, and students will be kept on their toes with a variety of question styles. While skill games and building cool robots with earned rewards are engaging, these types of activities are limited and most likely won't become a distraction.

How will teachers benefit?

DoodleMaths is also excellent for monitoring and assessing your class. Go to the Doodle Maths website, log in and  choose ‘Live Monitoring’ to view what is going on in a lesson. DoodleMaths feels like a very comprehensive service and one that is not going to add extra burdens to teachers. If anything, it should save time as it makes the setting of self-marking homework tasks easy.  It also logs and provides the evidence that teachers need to demonstrate progress. There are indications that the available features are likely to grow as a 'times tables' option within the teachers' dashboard is currently marked as coming soon. A few simple games are also included at the moment. Teachers will find the DoodleMaths setup process for classes and student accounts quick, with multiple methods like using class codes or copying and pasting from Excel or Word for bulk uploads.

How much does it cost?

A variety of subscription options are available to suit who is choosing to use the DoodleMaths service. A limited free option is available that gives a good overview of it. Premium accounts, paid monthly, yearly or even for a lifetime's access, open up the full potential of DoodleMaths. As the contents cover the primary school national curriculum and Key stage 3, you should think carefully about which option offers the best value to you. DoodleMaths can be accessed across all of the major platforms so you do not have to worry about matching your hardware to the service. DoodleTables is also included with your DoodleMaths subscription.

Bottom Line

DoodleMaths is not an app that children will use for hours at a time and it is not designed to be. What it is, is an excellent way to keep maths knowledge secure in a way that is painless for children, parents, and teachers. You may finder cheaper math apps, but they will not be of the high standard that DoodleMaths achieves.

You can download DoodleMaths on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the DoodleMaths app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.