MERGE Explorer 4+

Not there yet for remote teaching.

I just downloaded the latest update hoping they fixed a few of the things I think would improve the app. I’m a STEM teacher teaching elementary school students on an iPhone 11 Pro Max and the app still has trouble recognizing the cube in good light from 2 feet. My biggest issue is that I would like a way to share the experience with my students who are stuck at home with the rest of the country. There is no way to record this experience without an additional device. I tried screen recording but it only records the cube not the overlay. Also, when you turn the device to horizontal on some sections like the water cycle the words appear sideways. On the same section when you advance using next, “evaporation” appears but on the next advance all three appear instead of one at a time. Evaporation is not visible on the home screen of the water section only the other three. It would be an awesome tool if the developers took into account the fact that most of us using this right now have no one to share it with. At least, let us record the screen. Thanks for your consideration.

Developer Response ,

We’re sorry you haven’t had the best experience, but would love to help you get started teaching remotely with Merge Explorer! Please contact us at teamsupport@mergeedu.com so that we can help troubleshoot some of the issues you’re experiencing, and provide you with helpful links to remote teaching tutorials. We’ve seen a lot of amazing educators like yourself who are having great success using Merge EDU for remote learning, and we’d love the opportunity to help in any way we can. Hope to hear from you soon!
Best, Merge

Challenging to use during distance learning

I really wanted to love this app. It makes my phone really hot while it’s running. Most of the time the screen freezes, it’s very hard to share with the kids at home, and the whole app will often crash. I did record my screen while showing the cube, but it doesn’t record your voice showing it so it’s a silent video. Not ideal for second graders. Of course your free trial is attached to an automatic subscription that I’m now stuck with for another month. What a waste of $10. Content is awesome if it would be more user friendly and work without crashing.

Developer Response ,

Hello! We're sorry you're not having the best experience with Merge Explorer, but we would love to share some of our Remote Learning Resources with you. A good place to get started is mergeedu.com/remote - or contacting us through our website. iOS devices can record both video and mic audio through the device, and can be linked up directly to a computer to share during video calls. We’d be happy to show you how. For technical issues, please contact us at support@mergeedu.com so we can help solve this issue. And, you do not need the 7-day trial to test out the content - during this time of remote learning, we’ve been unlocking a lot of content for free, and will continue unlocking more content weekly through summer. Just press “skip” on the screen to see what we have made available for free. Best, Merge

Great for Remote Learning!

There are a lot of free activities open even without the free trial, which I was able to share with my students by connecting my phone to my PC and sharing the screen through Zoom or uploading a video recording through Seesaw (I had to Google how to record my iPhone screen with audio, but it works great). Several of my students had compatible devices at home that worked really well with the paper cube printout - I just had to instruct them to ‘SKIP’ the free trial and go straight to the free content. So far the anatomy activity “Mr. Body” and the ecosystems activity “The Food Web” have been big hits!