One of the lessons I’ve been teaching our five-year-old son recently is how to tell time. To assist me with this, I bought an educational toy clock made of wood and it has been a great help to us.
I believe that, as parents, we have a responsibility to teach our kids the value of time. Among other things, valuing time teaches our kids how to be respectful of other people, how to avoid being late and how to avoid falling prey to the “mañana” habit.
I recently discovered though another fun way to teach my son how to tell time and it is through an educational app called the Moji Clock Trainer. This app was developed by Mojitime, a company that builds educational apps in Sweden. Popular in the Nordics, they have a library of 150 games including those that teach math and other subjects in a fun and easy way.
The Moji Clock Trainer is specifically a learning game for kids who are about to learn how a mechanical clock works. With a simple yet effective learning approach, the kids can learn to tell the time with the support of encouraging speech and graphics. The application is easy to use and provides a number of different levels of difficulty.
The kids can:
- Listen to a voice telling the current time.
- Practice to set the clock by moving the watch’s hands to the correct positions, and receive proper feedback on their efforts
- Make progress through various levels of difficulty
- Have a positive learning experience supported by appealing graphics and animations
Mojitime gave me and my son a chance to try the app and here’s what we think about it.
Clicking on the app will give you this screen, which shows you the present time. Pressing the sound button on the top left portion will trigger a voice to tell you what the time is. Pressing the green play button enables you to go to the 6 different play levels.
This is what the next screen looks like. As you can see below, only level one is unlocked and you have to finish it in order to progress to the next levels, one after the other. However, you will see different settings at the lower portion which allows you different ways of playing the games.
Clicking on the lock settings button allows you to unlock the other levels. If you click on the second settings button from the right, it will allow you to choose whether you want birds to appear on the game when you play it or if you want them to appear later on as each answer is given.
These birds serve as counters. Normally, there are six birds in the game, which means that your kid has to set the clock correctly six times, as prompted by a voice. Six correct answers will allow your kid to advance to the next level. However, every wrong answer will make a bird fly by and poop!
The settings button at the middle, the one beside the lock button, allows you to choose whether you want the birds to disappear each time a wrong answer is made. A wrong answer will make a bird “poof” away. Disable this if you don’t want the “poofing” to occur.
The right most setting button is for the language. There are only two choices though: American English and British English.
Here’s what the game looks like if you select the birds to appear at the start of the game.
As you can see, there are instructions below which tells your kid what time he or she should set the clock. The sound prompt automatically appears, which is helpful for those kids who can’t read yet. You can just click on the sound button beside the instructions in case you need to hear the prompt again.
To make the correct answer, your child just needs to set the clock correctly and press the “OK” button.
This is what the game looks like when you choose the setting without the birds appearing at the onset.
I think the game is definitely very helpful in teaching kids how to tell time. Instead of setting the time yourself and asking your kid what time it is, they’re the ones who have to set the clock on their own. However, I do wish there was a portion in the game wherein I could set the time or manipulate the clock myself especially since I’m still really in the beginning stages of teaching my son to tell time. There is currently no option for parents or kids to do that here.
I also think the game is very fun for little kids. My son was really excited to use it. He had a ball laughing at the pooping and “poofing” birds. I’m not such a big fan of those features though. I think the game could do without it and could instead use some other feature to give kids some kind of reward for giving the correct answers.
I do like though that there are various levels of difficulty, which allows your kid to progress. The easy levels only asks your kids to set the time by the hour. The more difficult levels already ask your kids to set the time with the “minutes” involved.
Overall, I think the app is definitely worth a try. It costs only $1.99 and is easy to download via iTunes.
Moji Clock Trainer
For more info, visit: http://mojitime.com/moji_en.html
To download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moji-clock-trainer-english/id492614142?mt=8
Follow: @Mojitime on Twitter and Extransit on Facebook