🍎 Jack's Apples

Trace the numbers 1 to 20 with a finger, then fill the missing numbers into a grid of apples

What this is

A Year 1 homework sheet, Practice Numbers 1–20, turned into a game. The sheet has two parts, and so does the game — two halves, like a football match.

First half — trace. The numbers 1 to 20 appear one after another over school writing guides. A green dot and an arrow show where each stroke starts and which way it goes; the finger has to follow the line, and lifting it half way starts that stroke again. Two-digit numbers are written digit by digit, tens first.

Second half — apples. Twenty apples in four rows of five, in reading order. Some already carry their number, the rest are empty. The first empty apple pulses; four number tiles sit underneath, one of them right. Three grids per half, each with more gaps than the last. The first grid is the homework sheet exactly: 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 20 are given.

🎮 How to play

1️⃣   Find the green dot 🟢

Every number starts in one particular place. The arrow shows the direction.

2️⃣   Slide, don't lift 👆

Follow the grey line with one finger. Lift it and that stroke resets.

3️⃣   Fill the apples 🍎

"What comes after nine?" — tap the right tile and the apple fills in. A wrong tile just wobbles and greys out; nothing is lost.

⚽   Full time!

Every traced number and every finished grid earns a football. The whole row is counted out loud at the end of each grid.

🎯 What it practises

• ✍️   Forming the digits 0–9 the way school teaches them (a plain 1, an open 4, a 7 without a bar)
• 🔢   The order of the numbers to 20, and what comes next from any starting point
• 👂   Hearing every number said aloud in English as it is written or chosen

🎯 Accuracy

Getting inside the tolerance is a pass; hugging the line is better than a pass. While the finger moves, every sample is scored by how far it sits from the line of the stroke being traced — full marks up to 3 board units, falling away to nothing at TOL — and the meter under the board shows the running mean, red at 0% and green at 100%. Samples of a stroke that has to be started again are thrown away; samples of finished strokes count.

Accuracy	What happens
95% or more	"Super neat! Bonus football!" — a bonus ⚽ on top of the usual one, so a neat number is worth two
75–89%	"Nice and tidy!"
under 75%	"Good. Try to stay on the line."

The best score per number is kept in localStorage (jackApplesBest), and a number with a best of 90% or more keeps a small ⭐ on its chip in the number strip. The reset button clears it along with everything else.

⚙️ How the checking works

Each digit is one to two SVG strokes in a 100 × 140 cell; a two-digit number is two cells side by side on a 200 × 140 board. Checkpoints are sampled along each stroke with SVGPathElement.getPointAtLength() and must be reached in order within a tolerance radius. Ink is drawn on a <canvas> above the SVG using pointer events with touch-action: none, so a finger draws instead of scrolling the page.

TOL (17 board units, near the top of the script) is the single knob to turn if it feels too fussy or too forgiving for a particular child.

🎈 The other games

Game	What it is
📖 Jack's Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play
🥅 Jack's Match	Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear	▶ play
✏️ Jack's Letters	Finger-trace all 26 lowercase letters in the correct stroke order	▶ play
🔢 Jack's Numbers	Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20	▶ play
💯 Jack's Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play 👈 this one
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All eight on one start page: jackbenn.ing — homework games first, chess always last.

🛠 Built like this

Every game in this organisation is one self-contained index.html — no build step, no framework, no package manager, no analytics, and no network calls once the page has loaded. That is a deliberate constraint: a game a child depends on should still work in five years, and a parent should be able to read the whole thing in one sitting.

• Speech — the browser's Web Speech API, preferring a British English voice. It always waits for a tap first, because Chrome and iOS block audio without user activation.
• Progress — kept in localStorage on the device. Nothing is collected, sent or stored anywhere else.
• Made for an iPad mini in either orientation: finger-sized targets, no hover-only interactions, prefers-reduced-motion respected.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000

The start page at jackbenn.ing is built from google814/Jack, which is the source of truth. The repos in this organisation are copies kept in step by tools/sync-game-repos.sh in that repo, so each game also has its own page and its own link.