Do you remember repeating your times tables over and over again, hoping they would somehow become ingrained in your brain? As painful as that exercise may have been, most would agree it’s come in handy in life.
Well, Huntsville resident Matt Garvin happens to be a mobile developer. While working on times tables with his daughter Penelope, 13, (he didn’t want to use her real name on the World Wide Web), some very bright lights came on.
“I thought, why don’t I create an app to help her learn her times tables?” said Garvin. About 20 hours later, he had created what he referred to as a very simple, the 1.0 bare-bones version.
His creation had no graphics and little incentives, but it did the trick. Penelope would repeatedly try to beat her own score. “Within a week, she had mastered all her times tables up to 12. So I thought, again, ‘What the heck,’ and I added 13s, too. Which I admit is a little crazy. Who learns their 13s? But it was very little work to add them to the base app, so I did it. She got good at those, too,” explained Garvin.
It may have been a very simple app, but the seed was planted, and the game has grown from there. “I realized saving high scores made my little app challenging, and this small feature made a simple app into a sort of game. Trying to beat your high score was slightly addictive. But, in a good way!” wrote Garvin in his blog. With Penelope’s help, he is now working on the overall theme and in-game rewards to make learning your times tables a fun rather than a dreadful experience so that “Penelopes all over the world might use it.”
“I focus on the code and chasing down graphics while my own Penelope does some beta testing, and gives me feedback, and makes quirky suggestions that only a kid can think up.” Garvin said the game contains hidden features like having to find Easter eggs and includes surreal events like in Alice in Wonderland. “For instance, there is a “Giant Cat” mode where one of your rewards — a cat named “Chubbs” — suddenly becomes as big as a house!”
If you’re a graphic designer and you want to collaborate, get in touch; Garvin is hoping to add better graphics to the game.
He’s hoping the app does well when it’s ready for sale.”Money is always nice. But getting those Thank-You emails would be amazing, too! But even if our app isn’t a huge, conventional success, doing this project together has really bonded us as father and daughter,” he noted.
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After 7 months of hard work the app has been released! Please google “Penelope Teaches Times Tables” and download it from the Apple App store or the Google Play store. It looks especially good on big tablets! (For the record I am the app co-creator.)
Hi Matt – congratulations on this innovative and creative project that will help an innumerable amount of kids with essential skills. All the best~ Troy
Thanks for the kind comments. 🙂 The article didn’t mention the name of my app, so I want to share it here: “Penelope Teaches Times Tables”. THANK YOU.
This is awesome. Congratulations. I hope your app sells well and helps a lot of people, kids and adults both. Well done, Matt.
This is amazing! Kids need to know their times tables. Hope it is a success!