Help & support

Move a bead toward the beam.

Drag along its rod. Neighboring beads move together when they meet; the frame and beam limit their travel. Use one-rod practice for larger targets. iPhone uses landscape; iPad and Mac adapt to the window. On visionOS, look at a bead, pinch and move along its rod.

Read the number.

Lower beads count as one; upper beads count as five. Only the connected group against the beam counts. The rightmost rod is ones, then tens, hundreds and so on to the left. A traditional two-upper, five-lower rod can temporarily hold more than nine: carry manually. Open Beads & numbers to see each place’s contribution.

Double three times.

123456789 × 2 × 2 × 2 + 9 = 987654321

The demonstration starts with 123456789 already on the abacus. Three doubles reach 246913578, 493827156 and 987654312; add nine to finish at 987654321. Pause, continue or show one step. In practice, set the starting number yourself, then check each target. Checks include the taught bead representation and manual carries, not only the total. Leaving restores your free-play abacus.

Listen to the key chants.

Enable Lesson narration in the introduction or View menu. Only essential arithmetic chants are spoken; explanations stay on screen. Voices depend on those installed on your device. On iPhone, enabled narration can play in Silent mode; check media volume and the audio output. Bead sound effects have a separate switch.

A few things to know.

Manual bead editing is locked during the demonstration, even when paused. Choose practice or leave the game to move beads yourself. Use Reset view if the model is hard to see. If a matching system voice is unavailable, captions remain visible. Bead positions and lesson progress last only for the current window session; the narration preference is stored locally.

Minimum system versions

iOS

18.0+

iPadOS

18.0+

macOS

15.0+

visionOS

2.0+

Get in touch.

Email us with your app version, device, OS version and steps to reproduce the problem. Please avoid sending sensitive personal information. You can also report a bug on GitHub; GitHub reports are public.