Gracie & Friends Park Play

In Park Play, children create fair shares as they play in the park with Gracie and her friends. Shake the iPad to make apples fall from a tree and then divide them equally between friends! Give each friend the same number of hula hoops! Feed birds equal amounts of pie!

Features
• Three games!
• 21 levels of apple shaking
• 16 levels of hula hooping
• 8 levels of bird feeding
• Multiple modes of scaffolding and support
• Aligns with research-based early math learning trajectories
• No in-app purchases
• No advertising

This game provides a fun way for children to equipartition. Equipartitioning is dividing a collection of objects into equal groups or a continuous whole into equal parts. It is an important skill that helps build children’s understanding of fractions, ratios, division, multiplication, number sense, and number composition.

Learning Goals
This game is designed to help children strengthen their equipartitioning skills as they:
• Understand that making equal groups of objects means putting the same number of objects into each group or splitting a whole object into same-sized pieces
• Practice dividing collections and wholes into equal portions
• Identify groups or portions as being equal or having more or fewer / less
• Redistribute to make equal groups
• Repartition unequal-sized portions of wholes to make the portions equal
• Understand that wholes can be divided and distributed as collections


Park Play is part of the four-game equipartitioning suite from Early Math with Gracie & Friends™, a first-of-its-kind mobile app brand based in early learning sciences, rigorously researched and developed specifically for preschool classroom use. A randomized control trial demonstrated significant learning gains in children who used the Early Math with Gracie & Friends apps.

Early Math with Gracie & Friends is not just apps! Our research shows the value of hands-on, non-digital play in early learning. In fact, for every Gracie & Friends app, we have created and researched five or more hands-on activities!

The math-focused curriculum supplement of Early Math with Gracie & Friends is based on the Next Generation Preschool Math research project funded by the National Science Foundation. The research focused on the development of eight learning apps, more than 40 hands-on and traditional preschool activities, and a digital Teacher’s Guide—all designed for preschool classroom use.

About First 8 Studios at WGBH
WGBH Educational Foundation has pioneered children's educational media for decades. First 8 Studios at WGBH is dedicated to carrying this pioneering spirit into the digital, mobile world, building and researching new learning experiences for children from birth through age 8, their parents, and their teachers. Gold-standard research, funded by the National Science Foundation, serves as the foundation of our work. So does an ongoing commitment to the teachers and children we have worked with, and continue to work with, to give them a voice in the digital media development process. The countless hours we've spent with them have shaped Early Math with Gracie & Friends™ beyond measure. You'll find evidence of those big hearts and little fingerprints throughout each Gracie & Friends experience.

Privacy Policy
First 8 Studios at WGBH is committed to children's safety and well-being. This app collects only anonymous, aggregated analytics data for the purpose of improving the app experience. No personally identifiable data is collected.

Copyright
Early Math with Gracie & Friends™ and the characters and related indicia are trademarks of First 8 Studios @WGBH. ™/© 2014 WGBH Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

This Early Math with Gracie & Friends™ app was produced by WGBH Digital in Boston.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-1119118. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NSF.