TanZen's puzzles provide an excellent opportunity to challenge spatial skills, but it may cause frustration for students with weaker visual or motor skills. The paid version includes over 50 puzzles of animals, letters and other familiar objects. Every puzzle uses the same seven pieces that must fit together without overlapping to cover the designated shape, and students can use as many moves as they need without a timer. Students will find it relatively straight-forward to move pieces and get hints, but the tutorial may confuse some students and the Asian-American font may be difficult for others. The biggest concern is that the pieces don't "lock" into place, so students do need to have a lot of precision and patience placing and reorganizing shapes. While this free-form approach works well for hand-held puzzles, it could cause significant frustration in digital format. TanZen is a good digital version of Tangrams that can help students develop strong visual and spatial skills, but parents should determine if their children will do better with the traditional game where they can pick up and rotate the pieces without needing precise placement.

• Appropriate for a broad age range to use and enjoy
• Subject matter and problems are relevant, interesting and authentic to students
• Visually appealing to children in the target age range
• Provides virtual rewards or incentives after meeting specified goals or objectives
• Provides a "break activity" between academic problem sets
• Offers ongoing, progressive challenge
• Overall - Enjoyable. Given the option, students would choose this option

• Has a free or trial version
• Provides teaching guidance for adults to support the child and set appropriate goals
• Provides an age-appropriate tutorial/first time users can work independently
• Student should be able to use independently after first use
• Has a multi-player option to foster in-person collaboration or cooperation
• Multiple users can save a profile
• Student graduates to the next level or topic only after meeting a benchmark
• Can play without sound and not distract others
• Students can save work between sessions
• Can effectively understand and monitor student's progress (email report or in product)
• Provides options to play in languages other than English/Good for ELL
• Presents information in multiple formats (voice over, pictures and text, etc.)
• Overall - Easy to use

• Attention
• Fine Motor Skills
• Requires challenging finger movements, motor precision or physical manipulation
• Spatial Perception
• Requires remembering and completing a sequence of visual steps
• Visual Discrimination
• Directions are visually difficult to read
• Students might need support with navigation
• Visual Motor Speed
• Requires challenging finger movements, motor precision or physical manipulation

Find your Zen, with this updated version of the classic tangram puzzle game with over 500 puzzles!

Choose a puzzle to solve, and try to fit all seven game pieces within the shaded puzzle area without overlapping. TanZen HD will recognize when the puzzle is finished. Pick up and play for two minutes, or two hours!