For grown-ups
BarPals teaches the bar model, the drawing at the heart of Singapore-style word problems. Your child hears a short story, builds it with cubes, sweeps the cubes into one bar, then draws the bar themselves. The number sentence appears beside the bar a piece at a time.
The app checks the relationships in the drawing — are the parts end to end, is the bigger number the longer piece, do the bars start on the same line — and never how neat it is. That check is arithmetic. There is no AI marking your child's work.
Muddle the dodo makes the classic mistake on purpose: seeing the word “more” and adding. Your child's job is to spot it and fix it. Catching a wrong drawing is harder, and more useful, than copying a right one.
Print the paper strips (or draw them with a ruler) and do the same stories on the kitchen table. Hands first, then the picture, then the numbers.
There is no score, no streak and no timer. Nothing about your child leaves the device.
We describe what BarPals is designed to practise. No bar-model app, ours included, has outcome data yet.
What it never does
- No accounts, no ads, no tracking — anything kept stays on this device.
- No streaks, timers to beat, points to chase or leaderboards.
- No chat, and nothing anyone types is sent anywhere.