I am Douglas Tarlow

Carrot Sticks is a new app for educating kids about math. This is the kind of thing that actually gives me hope for the education of American kids, and I really appreciate the developers efforts. In my opinion, the app does a lot of things right:

1. No sign in to get started. Its like the free trial of online stuff. Don’t make us register before we taste the sweet fruit carrots. A pop-up screen does come up after you start playing, and I’m ok with that, I do wish it had a something like an “ignore forever” button because it did pop up several more times.

2. Rewards/Awards. When I got my first math achievement award, it was like wow, this actually might be something kids would really play.

3. Progress Tracking. You always know how far you’ve gone based upon the progress bar at the bottom. But more than that there are levels. When you complete a set of 100 carrots you get an achievement award. Today I got a “Math Achievement Award”, it made me feel special.

4. Get-it-Right. You can’t get an answer wrong, instead a small box simply turns red, until you get the right answer, and then it goes green and you get those sweet sweet carrots.

Check it out, its actually kind of fun, I did!

http://www.carrotsticks.com/