For Children 4 to 8
Little Lanterns
Android · ages 4 to 8 · free · works offline
A village of math toys, at night under a sky full of lanterns. Everything works through pictures, sound and touch, so a five-year-old can play it alone. Put one firefly in each window of a cottage. Cover a roof with paper patches and it lifts into a pavilion. Build a track and a little cart rolls across it, playing a note at every joint. The math is how the toys work.
Each place gets a step harder or easier depending on how it’s going. Tap Mote, the little lantern, and it shows how to play and leaves the answer to your child. Children take as long as they like, and every solved puzzle sends a lantern up into the sky. It’s free and works offline.
It should be on Google Play soon, for Android phones and tablets.
Where It Comes From
Little Lanterns started with Alexander Zvonkin’s Math from Three to Seven, the story of a math circle he ran for preschoolers in Moscow. It comes out of the Russian math circle tradition, where children get real problems and the time to work them out, and the grown-ups hold back on explaining.
I wanted that kind of math for young children, in toys that build real intuition before they can read. Several places are games from math circles: guessing a hidden rule, crossing every bridge once, sharing fairly, taking the last light.
Eleven Places
- Firefly Cottage: counting, matching and “how many”
- Moon Picnic: sharing fairly, division and leftovers
- Patchwork Pavilion: area, shape and planning where pieces go
- Glow Tracks: splitting lengths and sharing the parts
- Moon Moths: reflection and symmetry
- River Ribbon: planning one path across every bridge
- Lantern Quay: the number line and counting on
- Secret Doors: finding a hidden rule by testing
- Last Light: a take-turns strategy game with Mote
- Festival Loom: repeating patterns and the unit that repeats
- Parade Lane: finding every different one
Everything stays on the device. Privacy policy.