£-Fun - Money, Coins, Pounds, Notes, Currency

Teaching about money in the classroom can be a bit problematic.  Lots of plastic coins and mock-up notes are scattered over tables.  Teachers and assistants try to get around all of the children to see that they are using the makeshift money sensibly and understanding it correctly.

This app for assisting the teaching of money is both a tidier and more responsive tool.  Children always have enough of each coin and note for what they need.  Crucially, they also get feedback telling them whether they are correct without waiting for an adult to get to them.  Quicker feedback means more effective use of time.

There is a selection of activities that match many of the exercises that teachers want to set.  The exercises are: counting a given amount of money, selecting coins and notes up to a given value, and selecting the highest value of coin or note shown on screen.  All work well and are simple to use.  Children’s performance is recorded as a simple score table that lets teachers see how they have been doing during a lesson.

The activities can also be tweaked to match the understanding of children.  Notes can be turned off completely.  Timers can be disabled.  This latter feature makes the app ideal for demonstration purposes as teachers can use it on a mirrored screen.  It would be much clearer than holding up example coins and more flexible and quicker to prepare than a teacher-made presentation.

The app has not been updated for a while and clearly pre-dates the dominance of high-resolution screens.  The money is perfectly clear and readable and, on an older device, it looks as good as can be expected. On more recent devices there is a slight fuzziness to text and images.  

Something that is very unusual, but also welcome, in this app is its use of alternatives for the same coin.  At this point in time, British coins in circulation are a mix of the old design and the new.  Both crop up in this game.  This lets children be aware that unexpected changes can occur but by looking at the dominant characteristics of colour and shape, they can work it out.

Notes are a more static affair as they are only ever shown with the Queen’s head facing up.  As the designs on notes change with more frequency , this is probably a good thing to ensure a more consistent experience with the app.

The overall presentation of the app, both graphically and sonically, is perfectly up to the job.  Buttons are clear in what they do.  The few sound effects that there are, make it clear whether a correct or wrong answer has been entered.  The images, aside from the coins and notes,  have a clip art feel to them when taken as a whole, as they are not of a consistent style.  They do what they need to do, though.

£-fun is something of a no-frills app but it does what it promises for a fair price and is certainly one that can make a primary school teacher’s lessons on money easier.

You can download £-Fun - Money, Coins, Pounds, Notes, Currency on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.