The Little Math Helper

For children, mathematics can be difficult to learn, especially if there's not enough practice. To those starting from an early age to discover the basics, AddOrSubtract will shed some needed light on two of the most common operations.

When it comes to teaching kids the fundamentals of a subject like math, any help is welcomed, particularly if it concerns practical exercises. They are of the utmost importance because tare meant to show children how to actually put theory to work.

The first arithmetic operations to be learned and, as we will later find out, the most often used on a daily basis are addition and subtraction. Since these two play such a big part in our lives, it is all-important that youngsters get acquainted with them and, more that, make good friends with this pair.

To make things easier for kids as well as for parents who want to play an active role in the education of their sons and daughters, there are many applications dedicated to this purpose. Such a tool is AddOrSubtract that, as you probably guessed already, is bent on working with the mathematical operations that make up its name.

This utility is quite small in size, weighing in at only 580 KB and, best of all, free of cost. The installation takes a few seconds so you'll be able to have it up and running in no time at all. Once you open the software, you will notice the simple interface, without any eye-catching effects, just the plain workspace and the commands for controlling it.

Practicality is the main focus for this app and accessibility is also high on the priorities list because all the functions are well delimited and pretty easy to understand and use by anyone. You can run this tool using the preset parameters, or just as easy configure them as you please from the ''Options'' area.

The choices you are presented with concern, first of all, the range of numbers you will be utilizing for the exercises. You can select the each one for the top and, respectively, the bottom row that each question consists of. All there is to do next is opt for the operation that will be employed, addition or subtraction.

A mention definitely worth making at this point pertains to the maximum number of digits supported which is ten. Nonetheless, in the question area is only capable of displaying four of them. Another aspect you should be aware of is the handling of negative numbers. Even though they will appear as results of a certain operation, you won't be able to use them in defining the number ranges.

In order to stress the difference between the rows, AddOrSubtract has some colors up its sleeve: red for the upper and blue for the lower rows. Answering the questions is very easy since all you have to do is write the result and hit ''Enter''. Each query is logged in the history list, where you can view both the correct answer and the one given by the user.

Keeping track of all questions and their solution is very useful for anyone who wants to monitor the progress of the child and see what operations are the most problematic. However, there is a shortcoming to be noted here, namely the impossibility to save or print the results sheet for later review. A nice addition in this respect would be a chart for checking the evolution, without having to analyze dozens of questions.

The application will show the exact score of the respondent by displaying how many correct answers were provided out of the total number of questions. There is also a percent bar that serves the same purpose of evaluating the accuracy of the person taking the test. Each time you feel like starting over, you just have to press the dedicated button, but be careful because in doing so you will erase the results obtained thus far.

Aside from the stress that might be on the shoulders of children being examined, AddOrSubtract will not impact on your system, at least not in a noticeable manner. The resource usage is minimal, especially for the processor. During our tests, the dual-core 1.9 GHz AMD Athlon 64-bit CPU barely moved, while just over 3 MB of the 2 GB of available RAM were called to do all the hard labor.

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