MyBackpack - Waterford Learning

At first glance, MyBackpack looks fairly minimal with four simple icons on its menu screen. Underneath the surface, however, this app is crammed full of content that will keep young learners busy from early years settings into early primary years. The content is split into four main areas – maths games, nursery rhymes, story books and songs – all of which are easily navigated through a very intuitive interface.

The nursery rhymes and the story book sections are both well-populated, with content displayed in a virtual book style format, with pages to turn and the ability to take part or listen in different ways. The graphics are appropriate and very engaging for the target audience, and the accompanying sound effects, commentaries and music are all of a high quality, albeit with all-American accents!

The songs section of the app features dozens of catchy original songs, each of which introduces or develops an educational theme. The songs and accompanying animations are well thought through, with plenty of humour and interest, and likely to stand up to repeated viewings without losing their appeal. Educationally, these songs are very rich and complement several different curriculum areas to great effect.

The highlight of the app, however, is arguably the section of mental maths games. The learner can chart their progress within a virtual learning path made up of over twenty progressive levels. The learning curve here is pitched fantastically so that the learner can take part in several different games to consolidate one level of mathematical learning before moving on. There is enough variety to maintain interest without generating confusion, and the well planned-out interface and progression again makes it easy for even a very young learner to start making progress without much supervision. The graphics and animation in this section is again impressive – particularly the very visual representation of an equal sign meaning a balance, which should help to prevent common misconceptions as the sums get harder.

The only slight drawback worth noting is that the app is predictably very large and so takes quite some time to install and load up. There are sometimes delays on navigating between different parts of the app too, which is understandable given the scope but may prove slightly frustrating to a young user.  Overall though, this app provides hours of well-designed educational fun and all completely free.

You can download MyBackpack - Waterford Learning on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.