Furbles is an old favourite of mine that I’d forgotten about until recently (thanks Lara!). Furbles started life as an idea for teaching statistics in an interesting way with children from KS1 to KS3. The original version was published in 2003 online, and its popularity spread. It’s a great resource for maths teachers.

Furbles was originally devised as an innovative way of imagining statistics and the depiction of statistics. You have a variety of creatures of different colours and shapes which you can move around on the screen. You can then arrange them into different charts and graphs to show simple frequency data. The children can see the Furbles move into the correct groups, and are then replaced by the corresponding bar graph, pie chart etc. It’s lovely and visual.

You can find out more here: http://ptolemy.co.uk/furbles

The old 2003 version is still freely available – and it’s well worth bookmarking: http://ptolemy.co.uk/furbles/furbles03.  It’s Flash-based so you might need to use the Puffin browser if you want to use it on your iPad.