Product Review: Smart Numbers

Manufacturer: Marbotic
URL: http://www.marbotic.fr/
Where to buy: Marbotic’s Online Shop 
Price: €34,99

Made by the French company, Marbotic, this little box of 10 smart wooden numbers makes for a really unusual gift for children aged 3-8 years old this Christmas.

Inspired by Montessory pedagogy, these beautifully made wooden letters interact with your tablet via three (free) downloadable apps, which provide a fun way for children to learn basic counting, addition and subtraction skills.

The numbers are easily picked up by little fingers by a small, tactile metal knob and pressed onto your tablet screen in response to a wide range of  maths questions posed by the apps.  The sensors on the back of the numbers are flexible, so as not to damage your screen, and the apps themselves have been designed with appealing, colourful French-style fonts and graphics, which lend a real charm to the experience of using technology with children.

Delighted to make a start with ours as soon as we arrived, we followed the instructions provided and downloaded the free apps, which we ‘unlocked’ using the numbers.  To our great disappointment, however, our numbers didn’t seem to work – even when we pressed them carefully against the screen in answer to the questions we had selected.

I contacted our supplier of the goods we had been provided for review, asking for another set – suspecting they were faulty – and was promptly contacted by Marbotic’s founder, Marie Mérouze, who was very concerned to learn about our experience and was keen to help us resolve the problem.  It transpired that a small crack in the corner of my iPad was the cause and a test on another device soon proved the games all functioned perfectly – so for anyone buying them for use on a cracked screen – I wouldn’t recommend!

Great customer service from Marbotic, however, and a lovely little product that both our local Montessori nursery and my son’s primary school have really enjoyed experimenting with and agree it is a product they would give serious consideration to introducing into the classrooms for their Early Learning and KS1 children in the future.

A lovely gift that bridges the gap between the traditional and the modern and teaches young learners to enjoy interacting with numbers.