This is Ruby, our two and a half year old Granddaughter and owner of her own iPad Mini (she is also probably the youngest Apple shareholder out there, as part of her Junior ISA). She was fairly adept with her parents iPhones and iPads around the house months before she was two, albeit curious as to why there was no “Skip Ad” option on the TV at home (try as she did).

Her staple diet is YouTube (primarily Peppa Pig, Ben & Holly’s Magic Kingdom, and more recently Thomas the Tank Engine and Alphablocks). This weekend, there was a section on BBC Click that showed some primary school kids in Malawi, each armed with iPads and green headphones, engrossed doing maths exercises. The focus then moved to a Primary School in Nottingham, using the same application built for the kids in Malawi, translated to English but with the similarly (and silently) engrossed.

I found the associated apps (search for author “onebillion” and you should see five of them) and installed each on her iPad Mini:

• Count to 10
• Count to 20
• Maths, age 3-5
• Maths, age 4-6
• 2, 5 and 10 (multiplication)

The icons look like this, red to the left of the diagonal and with a white tick mark, orange background on the rest; the Malawi versions have more green in them in place of orange.

We put her onto the English version of “Count to 10”, tapped in her name, then handed it over to her.

Tapped on the rabbit waving to her, and off. Add frogs the the island (one tap for each):

Then told to tap one to remove it, then click the arrow:

Ding! Instant feedback that seemed to please her. She smiled, gave us a thumbs up, then clicked the arrow for the next exercise:

which was to add three birds to the wire. Press the arrow, ding! Smile and thumbs up, and she just kept doing exercise after exercise on her own bat.

A bit later on, the exercise was telling her to put a certain number of objects in each box – with the number to place specified as a number above the box. Unprompted, she was getting all those correct. Even when a box had ‘0’ above it, and she duly left that box empty. And then the next exercise, when she was asked to count the number of trees, and drag one of the numbers “0”, “1”, “2”, “3” or “4” to a box before pressing the arrow. Much to our surprise (more like chins on the floor), she was correctly associating each digit with the number of objects. Unprompted.

I had to email her Mum at that stage to ask if she’d been taught to recognise numbers already by the character shapes. Her Mum blamed it on her Cbeebies consumption alone.

When we returned her home after her weekend stay, the first thing she insisted on showing both her Mother and her Father was how good she was at this game. Fired it up herself, and showed them both independently.

So, Kudos to the authors of this app. Not only teaching kids in Malawi, but very appealing to kids here too. Having been one of the contributors to its Kickstarter funding, I just wonder how long it will be before she starts building programs in ScratchJr (though that’s aimed at budding programmers aged 5-7). It’s there on her iPad already when she wants to try it – and has her Scratch literate (and Minecraft guru) 10 year old brother on hand to assist if needed.

I think buying her her own iPad Mini (largely because when she stayed weekends, I never got my own one back) was a great investment. I hope it continues to provide an outlet for her wonder of the world around her in the years ahead.