We recently had the opportunity to review Typing Tournament Online and Maths Invaders Online from EdAlive. The children are always excited to try out new online learning opportunities especially when they are in the form of games.
I used Typing Tournament Online with both my seventh grade son and my fifth grade daughter. The program is set in medieval times with knights and dragons. This makes it a bit more interesting than just typing practice. My daughter really liked that it was teaching her new typing skills and not just providing practice. She said, “typing is a lot of fun and I learned very quickly and it helped me to increase my speed.”
The program starts with lessons and practice at each level and then progresses to games that you can play once you are comfortable with the level’s material. If you win the game, it lets you take the test to move up to the next level. There were several games but her two favorite games were the Dragon Chase game and Siege. In Dragon Chase, you are racing a dragon to get to the castle, you type words to race and the higher up in levels you get the faster you have to type. Siege is another fun game where you type words that are attacking the castle, as you type them it blows up the words, if the word gets to the top of the castle you lose and have to try again.
If your student already has some typing proficiency, they can test out of levels until they reach their current level of proficiency. I really liked this part of the program because it kept my children from being bored in the early stages. Once you complete (or test out) of all of the levels on the map you earn a movie. My daughter was very excited to earn the movie, though she was not overly impressed with the movie itself once she watched it. You can then go back in and set a higher goal and continue working. My son also enjoyed Typing Tournament Online but has not quite finished the map yet. There are also some great parental reports to help you track progress.
Maths Invaders Online was a math review program that takes the form of space games. The two main games are Galactic Campaign and Space Rescue. Galactic Campaign was the main program and by scoring well you could earn the opportunity to play Space Rescue. We had a little bit of a false start in this program because we did not realize at first that you could change the level. This meant that, much to their delight, my fifth and seventh graders were doing lots of basic addition and subtraction. Once I realized that we needed to go in and set their levels it was more challenging for them and more beneficial. I do wish setting the levels would have been explained a little more clearly so that we could have started out on the right track.
Maths Invaders Online is not a game that you would use to teach new math skills but provides a fun way to review their current skills and increase speed and proficiency with math facts. You can choose for them to work on a certain grade level material or even go in and choose a particular skill that they need to work on. For example, I was able to go in and choose fifth grade level fractions for my daughter to review because that was a skill we had just covered in her math book.
There are a variety of reports in the parent portal that let me know what skills they have mastered, how many questions they have answered during a given activity, percentages, correct, and it can even correlate their work with several different sets of standards if your instruction is based off of one of those sets of standards.
Overall, we enjoyed both of these programs but the favorite for both children was Typing Tournament Online. We felt that it really helped them to improve while enjoying their typing time (they would even use it during their free time). I encourage you to visit the EdAlive website to check out these two programs as well as their other products. You can check out how other families used these programs by clicking on the link below to view the other reviews.
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