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Math Rider: An NHL Video Review

November 11, 2010 TechyDad Computers, NHL, Review, Videos

When I reviewed Math Rider, I planned on getting NHL to review it as well. After all, he’s the one who played the game. I can say it’s great and wonderful and all but if your child doesn’t really like it or want to play it, then there’s not much point, is there? So I sat down with NHL last night, loaded up Math Rider and let him play while doing a video review. Here’s the result:

So there you have it. NHL’s thoughts are “I think everybody should have this game.” I’m pretty sure that would be a two thumbs up if his thumbs (and the rest of his fingers) weren’t typing out math answers.

Disclaimer: Math Rider provided me with a complimentary copy of the game for review in conjunction with the Family Review Network. This video post, however, was my own idea. All of the opinions expressed above (both in the text and video) are mine and NHL’s.

Riding your way to improved math skills

November 9, 2010 TechyDad Computers, NHL, Review

NHL is a big fan of math. He’ll try to work it into pretty much anything he does. Working on an art project? Look for an addition statement to be tacked on somewhere. Have a few minutes with nothing to do? He’ll grab a calculator and figure out what 63,492 + 77,315 is.

Unfortunately, he really isn’t being challenged in math this year. Thanks to his gifted brain, he picks up math concepts nearly instantly. Other classmates, of course, need reinforcement. So while the teacher goes over simple addition again, NHL is ready to move onto multiplication and division. Seriously, he is. I did some sample multiplication and division with him and he “got it” within seconds, even giving me the answer before I could tell him. He then asked about fractions when I made an offhand remark about them. I still think those will be above him, but not for long.

When I was given the opportunity to review Math Rider, I jumped at the chance. NHL loves using the computer and he loves math, so he was sure to love this. And man did he love it! More on this later.

The basic premise is that you are a villager in “Math Land” with your horse Shadow. Depending on which level you choose, you’ll get one of three missions. The mission is introduced with drawings and a narrator, but the words are printed underneath. (Nice side effect of boosting reading skills here.) After the introductions are over, the mission begins. For this, the child will need to solve math problems. They aren’t just displayed on the screen, however. Instead, your horse is galloping across the lands, racing to reach your goal. In your way are hurdles with math problems (e.g. 5 + 3) on them. Typing in the right answer (e.g. 8) makes your horse jump over them. You can type the answer early. Shadow is smart enough to jump at the right time. Type the answer too late, though, and Shadow is forced to stop while the math problem and answer are read aloud.

This alone, would make for a nice game, but Math Rider goes further. On a Statistics page, you can find out just how well you are doing and which problems are the ones that give you the most trouble. These problems will also tend to appear more often while Shadow is running, helping to strengthen the child’s math skills.

Of course, being a full-featured math game, Math Rider lets you work with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Each of those can be attempted on “Easy”, “Medium”, or “Advanced” mode, indicating whether the math goes up to 5, 10 or 12. Finally, multiple riders can be set up so Child 1 can tackle easy addition and keep his statistics separate from Child 2’s advanced multiplication stats.

When NHL began his first mission, getting a magic flower to help his character’s sick mother, he quickly picked up on what he needed to do. Before long, he was laughing with joy every time he got a problem right. He was getting most of them right, too, so there was a lot of laughing! Occasionally, he would get one wrong and he would groan in frustration, mainly at himself for not knowing it, but then he would get it right the next time it came up.

It was interesting watching the program zero in on the math problems that he took the longest to figure out. Those would wind up appearing more and more so he would quickly pick up on the answers to these. Confession time: I also tried it out on Advanced Multiplication and messed up on 9 * 12. Sure enough, 9 * 12 came up quite frequently after this and I knew that it was 108.

If your child is struggling in math, loves math or maybe just needs a source of entertainment that doesn’t involve mindless video game destruction, I would definitely recommend Math Rider. I, for one, know that NHL will be borrowing my computer quite often to advance his rider into new and exciting quests.

Disclaimer: This post was written for Family Review Network & Math Rider who provided the complimentary product for review in exchange for my honest review.

Problems of a Mouse Power Nature

October 17, 2010 TechyDad Computers, Life

Thursday was a very expensive day.

For the past week, my car’s been making a rattling sound when I turned on the fan. The higher I turned it on, the worse the sound. At first, I thought water had gotten into the system (with all the rain we had), so I ignored it hoping the sound would go away. When the dry weather arrived and the sound didn’t leave, I knew there was a problem.

So I brought my car in and the guy mentioned offhand, “I hope it’s not a mouse.”

“A mouse?", I asked.

“Yes, they look for someplace warm and dry and find their way into cars.”

So he went to check on my car. Sure enough, it turns out I was paid a visit by a certain mouse. Personally, I would have rather had a visit with Mickey Mouse… in Disney World! The mouse crawled into my car’s heating/cooling system, built a nest and got all comfortable. Then I turned on the fan and made minced mouse. (No, this will *NOT* be a future Cooking With TechyDad installment!) I was told fixing it would take some time as most everyone had gone home and they needed to remove my dashboard and go through my systems. We were looking at about a $160 hit to my wallet.

I was loaned a car for the next day and went home. That night, I went on my computer, started to Skype with my parents and…. my computer went dead. Completely off. I turned it back on and noticed that the battery was running low. Yet, I was plugged in. Perhaps the outlet was bad? No, the baby monitor plugged into it worked just fine. I even tried another outlet. No dice.

There could only be two possibilities. Either my laptop’s AC adapter was bad (possibly fried when I left it plugged in overnight) or my laptop itself had a problem. So I spent last night frantically backing up my PC before the battery ran out. Luckily, I had run a backup recently and so just had to update that backup. Now I’m looking for a new AC adapter to see if that’s the problem.

With all of Thursday’s events, I think I need to consult with a mouse, a duck, a dog, a pooh bear, and a tigger in Disney World. Who wants to join me?

Aloha Friday: How Does That Work?

September 3, 2010 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Computers, Internet

While at the BlogHer 2010 session “Fight Spam and Hackers! Plugging Security Holes in Your Social Media Life” (audio), I Amy of Amiable Life asked a question. She said that she wants to understand security issues but that much of the reference material went over her head. She was wondering if there was any “WordPress for 5th Graders” or “How to Protect Yourself for an eight year old.”

This sparked an idea. I understand this technical stuff and pride myself on the ability to explain complex items in simple terms. So why couldn’t I take a subject like “How Does The Internet Work” and, perhaps using some crude graphics, explain how it works without delving into the details of TCP/IP, request headers and other topics that would cause peoples’ eyes to glaze over?

I still have some work to do before I can pull this off. The words will come easily, but I’ll need some graphics. And those might be trickier for me to do. So this might be a once every-other-month type of feature. My other concern is the selection of topics. How am I going to figure out which topics people want to learn about? Well, as this is an Aloha Friday, I bet you can guess how. I’m going to ask everyone out there!

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What computer/technology subjects would you like explained simply?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #53

Easy Linkup with LinkE

July 22, 2010 TechyDad Computers, Review, Roku

When we moved into our house, our computer systems went upstairs. Over time, though, we found that we were using the downstairs more. This was aided by the addition of a wireless router and our laptops. When we added our Roku and CinemaTube, we hooked them up to our wireless network. This was a fine solution, but wireless is slower than direct Ethernet hookups. Unfortunately, running network cable throughout our house wasn’t an option due to the age of our house and type of walls it has. That, plus we had enough home repair bills without drilling through walls just to run cable.

Enter the LinkE. The LinkE, from Brite-View, uses Powerline Networking technology to connect your devices to your router. Put simply, the traffic flows through your router, into the LinkE bridge, through your house’s power lines, through the LinkE switch and to your device. If that sounds complicated, all you need to know is that you plug the bridge into an electrical outlet near your router, connect it to the router and then plug the switch into any other electrical outlet in the house. After connecting a device to the switch, you have Internet access.

I took the LinkE out of the box and plugged one unit in downstairs near our TV. I plugged the other unit in upstairs near our router. I was actually expecting more setup than that. I figured that I’d need to log into some administrative panel and fiddle with some settings or something. Instead, it was literally plug and play. When I hooked it up to our Roku, our Roku was able to tell that it was connected to a wired network and could use that instead of the wireless network. Before you could say “powerline networking”, Netflix movies were streaming through our power lines and onto our TV.

This was highly convenient, but it wouldn’t be much use if the speeds didn’t meet or exceed wireless network speeds. Brite-View advertises speeds up to 200Mbps, but, since my ISP doesn’t give me that much bandwidth, I didn’t expect to reach that figure. Still, I wasn’t dissappointed. The Netflix loading seemed to go faster and, when I connected it to my computer, my web page load times seemed to shrink.

Of course, I’m too much of a geek to accept “seemed to.” I want hard numbers. To quantify just how much of a boost I got, I ran six speed tests at DSLReports.com. First, I ran three using my wireless connection. This resulted in an average speed of about 1984.7 Kbps down and 988 Kbps up. Next, I ran three tests while connected via LinkE for an average of 2414.7 Kbps down and 1000 up. (I cleared my browser’s cache after each test to avoid any influence there.) The upload speeds were comparable, but the download speed improved by 22%.

Wireless Speed Test Results:

LinkE Speed Test Results:

I would definitely recommend the LinkE for connecting home theater equipment to the Internet. Nowadays, many electronics (Blu-Ray, Roku, CinemaTube, etc) come with ethernet ports. Not all come with wireless built-in. Instead of buying wireless adapters for each of these, you could hook up one LinkE and network all of our devices. The LinkE can be purchased from Brite-View. The 1 port bridge + 4 port switch model that I tested retails for $84.99.

Disclaimer: I recieved the LinkE 1 port bridge + 4 port switch model complimentary from Brite-View to test. No other compensation was given. The opinions expressed above are my own.

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