Dumpling Garden support

A guide for grown-ups to the village and its math.

Dumpling Garden hides grade 3–5 math inside the daily life of a tiny village: what looks like farming, cooking, shopkeeping, and carpentry is actually arrays, fractions, money, and measurement. Your child's job is to feed the villagers and build homes for new ones; the math simply comes along for the ride.

Where the math hides

🌱 Garden

Seeds go in as rows-and-columns arrays — multiplication your child can literally see and count. Watering brings sprouts up over time.

🥟 Kitchen

Steamer trays teach fractions of a whole; recipes get doubled and halved; baking asks elapsed-time questions.

🏪 Market

Villagers order food, and your child totals the bill and counts back change from a big coin — any coin combination that adds up correctly is accepted.

🔨 Workshop

A house plan's width and height drive a real build order: planks from the perimeter, roof tiles from the area, paint cans from division rounded up. The answers become the shopping list, and the finished house welcomes a new villager.

The Orders Board ties the zones into one loop: a villager asks for a dish, which sends your child to the garden for the crops, the kitchen to cook, and the market to hand it over.

How difficulty behaves

Every skill climbs a five-rung ladder. Five right answers in a row step it up; three misses in a row step it quietly back down. Nothing is ever timed, and a miss costs nothing: the response to a wrong answer is a sympathetic head-tilt, a hint (usually a skip-count ladder or a picture of the problem), and another go. If your child is beyond the early rungs already, open the grown-ups area and raise the difficulty floor so no skill starts below their level.

Common questions

Two kids, one iPad?

Make a profile for each on the title screen. Coins, crops, friends, and progress are fully separate. Erasing a profile is deliberately tucked behind the grown-ups gate.

What is the gate exactly?

A mental-arithmetic question sized for adults. It guards the parent dashboard, profile deletion, and the art-style switch — the handful of things a wandering small finger shouldn't press.

Turning the sound down?

Music and effects each have their own toggle in the parent dashboard, and the choice sticks between sessions.

Lost progress after deleting the app?

That's expected, unfortunately: the village exists only in the app's own folder on that one iPad (see the privacy page for why), so deleting the app composts the village with it.

Talk to the developer

Found a bug? Did a problem feel unfair? Does your child have a wish for the village? All of it is welcome at russlambgames@gmail.com — several of the game's best features started as one child's suggestion.