STEM
CountingPals
Number Sense + Early Addition for Ages 5-7 — subitizing, counting, comparing, one-digit addition. Calc Jr (younger calculator-monster) guides daily 15-min math routines.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 10 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning.
Mentored by Calc Jr
#A8D5F0 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Calc Jr hosts the math garden with three friends: Tappa taps each thing once as she counts, Hop's jumps are always the same size, and Pile sorts things into groups.
Tappa
One-to-one correspondence — soft russet squirrel who taps each item as she counts; trail of glowing number-dots above each tapped item
Read chapter →
Hop
Same-sized jumps / early addition seed — cream-and-grey rabbit whose hops are always exactly the same length; visible dotted-line jump-arcs as equal arcs
Read chapter →
Pile
Grouping + same-vs-different — plump warm-amber hedgehog who scoops + groups + piles things into matching bunches; tidy piles of 3s + 4s + 5s on color-coded sorting-mat
Read chapter →
Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Number Sense + Early Addition for Ages 5-7 — subitizing, counting, comparing, one-digit addition. Calc Jr (younger calculator-monster) guides daily 15-min math routines.
Mentored by Calc Jr — no data leaves the device.
How CountingPals handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
For you, the grown-up
The grown-up side of CountingPals on Spark & Whetstone, our free site for grown-ups: The Maths They Teach Now (ten-frames). Quick-look dots and ten-frames; the lesson shows you the frame they use.
CountingPals runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
CountingPals is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
