Examples of Art, Music, Math, and Science Apps

by Laura Kazmierczak, EC-SEAT Scholar

Tiggly chef is a free app that combines fun cooking creations and early addition math concepts through cause and effect. The app allows for flexibility with numbers and reinforces the addition process with verbal narration as the items chef identifies are chosen by the student. The app can be used for all children learning early addition math concepts and would be especially beneficial to a child who loves to pretend to cook. The app also provides customization capabilities with the options to create your own recipes, ingredients, and addition problems. With its variations in recipe problems the app eliminates the possibility of simply memorizing problems to get them right and aims for learning through purposeful or meaningful ways. The app requires finger isolation and the ability to drag items into a bowl. You can also drag more than one item at a time to make varying math problems with the ingredients. Once the recipe's math problems are complete, you see the food creation you made by successfully completing the recipe.

Musical Paint for Kids - This app combines art and music into one. This app provides auditory feedback when painting as each stroke made in the child's creation is a musical note or tone allowing for creative expression through creating a picture and composing a sound sequence. Once the picture is created, you can frame it (save) and play it back to hear the masterpiece as it is hung on the wall with the other paintings in the museum. The app can easily be used with adapted stylus’.

Art of glow provides children with free and fun creative expression. It would be beneficial to children who need help with regulation or to reset themselves as they can draw as crazy and as much as they want or as little as they want. It would also help in practicing finger isolation as there are no specific patterns to follow and there is nothing to "mess up" on so the child can focus most on muscle memory instead of getting a pattern or sequence right. You can adjust the colors, stroke symbols, and lifetime of the glow on the page. It is a cause and effect app that shows the stroke and motions made by the child immediately back to them.

Solar System lite provides the user with introductory and comprehensive information presented by astronaut Ashley about the solar system and fun facts and information to go along with the planets. The app has visual and auditory feedback with written descriptions and verbal descriptions. It is appropriate for all children who are learning about the solar system and planets and provides interactive play with solar scenes, quizzes and the options to place pins on the planets for additional information. It would definitely reinforce information and learning at home and allowing the child to make the connections to what was learned during school time. I would recommend this app for kids starting at age 6 and I think it would be a great app for a child who has a specific interest in the planets that is on the spectrum or has ADHD as it would be useful for focusing their energy.




Laura is a first year EC-SEAT scholar in the Early Childhood Special Needs masters program. She is interested in learning more about the benefits to classroom inclusion from the child's perspective who's learning with exceptionalities.