Educational App Critique: Tanzen HD

Tanzen is a wonderful and very calming app that helps children manipulate shapes and make tangrams. This program allows students to choose from a variety of outlines to then manipulate shapes by selecting, rotating and moving shapes across the outline. The shape must be put in the right space and not overlap with another shape for the player to win the game.

A fantastic tutorial is provided for the player to understand how to manipulate the shapes in order to have them in the right location. Hints are provided in the game as some of the pieces can be difficult to identify. From a teaching standpoint, this game is a wonderful means of teaching the children the relationship between a square and a diamond. It also is helpful in teaching that triangles can be seen in a variety of ways, and by turning and rotating them this will be obvious to the children.

From an educational standpoint it would be great if the shapes were named so that the player would have exposure to these names while playing.

This is a free app and can be downloaded from Itunes.