This is one of my favorite reviews of our TenseBuilder speech and language app. The thing I like best about it is that the author understands what I was really trying to accomplish with this app. I wasn’t trying to create another app to drill tense. There are already a bunch of apps out there to do that as well as 50 years worth of flash card games. What I wanted was to create UNDERSTANDING of tense, not memorization. A deep understanding of what tense is all about is essential if a student is to retain what they have learned and carry it over to their conversational speech.
Here is my favorite passage in the review.
Students with significant language delays and autism have a very difficult time understanding the passing of time. I have struggled for many years to figure out the best way to teach this concept with varying levels of failure. Tense Builder has been my first real success. The thing I love about TenseBuilder is that it addresses the underlying issue of understanding the meaning of tenses, how language denotes time. There are so many language materials available for addressing appropriate verb tense from drill cards to pictures scenes to worksheets. But the focus is on production of the appropriate verb tense. But students must also understand why these tense markers are important in order to appropriately generalize the skill.
Although the app currently has 42 animations, it will soon have 58. In addition, I have added a “short” lesson for kids who don’t want to sit through the longer lesson. This short lesson is similar to the lessons I have in PrepositionBuilder. When the student gets an incorrect answer, the image or sentence changes to match what the student did choose. In this way, they are learning when the get the answer right or wrong.
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