Animal Safari Math

Built for my four-year-old. I wanted to start them early on Singapore-style math — number sense first: quantity, number bonds, parts and wholes — and everything out there buries the math under the kids-app stuff. Mascot economies, sticker meters, narrated everything. Not pure math enough, and the weight of it all is the annoyance.

The bet: a small game that is only the math, with just enough on screen — an animal holding the answer — to keep a four-year-old in the chair.

Build number facts, see parts and wholes, work with tens. Tap the animal holding the right answer, race the clock, move on.

Quantity comes before symbols, the Singapore way: a number is an amount you can see and split before it's a squiggle you manipulate. Difficulty follows the player silently — no settings screen, no "choose your level". The game watches how fast the answers come and adjusts.

The timer is load-bearing, and I nearly cut it. Without one there's no reason to answer quickly, and speed is what turns recall into fluency. Set it too tight and a kid stops playing entirely. Almost all the tuning went into that single number, which I had assumed would be an afterthought.

Staying an experiment. It does one thing for one kid, and it didn't need to become a product to have been worth building.