Gracie & Friends Birthday Café

In Birthday Café, children serve up birthday treats to a hungry party! Children seat groups of friends at tables and then distribute trays that have the same number of food items.

Features
• 20 levels of birthday celebration gameplay
• Adaptive pacing to meet each child's math level
• Multiple modes of scaffolding and support
• Aligns with research-based early math learning trajectories
• No in-app purchases
• No advertising

This game is designed for children to subitize. Subitizing is looking at a group of objects and quickly recognizing how many objects are in the group without having to take the time to count. It is an important skill that helps develop number sense and prepare children for mental math.

Learning Goals
This game is designed to help children strengthen their subitizing skills as they:
• Recognize sets of one to five objects without counting
• Learn and reinforce number names and symbols
• Understand that quantity can be represented by a numeral or a set of objects
• Understand that the quantity of a set is not affected by the arrangement of the objects in the set
• Compare sets of one to five objects and identify if the sets are the same or different

Birthday Café is part of the four-game subitizing suite from Early Math with Gracie & Friends™, a first-of-its-kind mobile app brand based in early learning sciences, rigorously researched and developed specifically for preschool classroom use. A randomized control trial demonstrated significant learning gains in children who used the Early Math with Gracie & Friends apps.

Early Math with Gracie & Friends is not just apps! Our research shows the value of hands-on, non-digital play in early learning. In fact, for every Gracie & Friends app, we have created and researched five or more hands-on activities! Check them out at http://first8studios.org

The math-focused curriculum supplement of Early Math with Gracie & Friends is based on the Next Generation Preschool Math research project funded by the National Science Foundation. The research focused on the development of eight learning apps, more than 40 hands-on and traditional preschool activities, and a digital Teacher’s Guide—all designed for preschool classroom use.


About First 8 Studios at WGBH
WGBH Educational Foundation has pioneered children's educational media for decades. First 8 Studios at WGBH is