Conception

ParentHelper was conceived after the 3 of us watched a stunning documentary (originally aired on British TV on February 2010 called Kids Don’t Count) about children in today’s British schools who seem to lack the basic skills of basic maths.

At the start of the programme the children were given a test to complete. The results were sad for everyone concerned, as it appeared the children had not been taught correctly how to do simple arithmetic.

Teachers also volunteered (anonymously) to do the test. This was even more astonishing as only 1 teacher out of group of 10 was able to answer correctly all the questions.

A cut down quiz was posted onto the television channel’s website for viewers to take the test. You had 15mins to answer 12 questions. We all noted from the flurry of results on various social media channels from parent friends that they too had faired badly.

ParentHelper app was thus conceived.

The 3 of us felt passionately about this as we all have children of varying ages and were concerned that our children where not being taught the way we were on how to do simple sums like “121 x 57″.

The App

ParentHelper is an App based on Apple’s iPhone OS platform that runs on iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad and has been tested and approved for iOS4.

ParentHelper is for Parents. To help them go back to basics and understand step-by-step how to correctly arrive at answer to a calculation such as long division.

The core functions of the app are the following:-

• Multiplication
• Addition
• Subtraction
• Division
• Timestables

Show Me / Try Me Mode

Is a unique feature to ParentHelper that switches between the application showing the workings of a sum so that you can understand simple what is going on and “Trying” to do the calculation yourself. In the “Try” me mode ParentHelper will feedback if your answers to the steps are correct.