Fidget Spinner App Gets 7 Million Downloads

An iOS and Android app that digitizes fidget spinners, a children’s toy, has been downloaded more than 7 million times.

Fidget spinners have grown in popularity in the last couple of months, and businesses worldwide are jumping to meet the demand. Some schools in the United States are banning these handheld gadgets that were supposedly made with the intention of helping students with special needs, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, feel at ease and relieve stress. Many administrators and teachers find these gadgets to be too distracting for use in the classroom, while others have said they are being used dangerously, The Washington Post reported. Schools in at least 11 states have banned fidget spinners.

Meanwhile, other schools have hopped onto the trend bandwagon and are using fidget spinners creatively during class time. One elementary school in California, for example, is using fidget spinners in math classes to “randomly select math problems to solve, write how-to manuals, and work on verbal communication skills,” according to a local news report.

In any case, these toys are as popular in app-form as they are in real life. There are already a few hundred fidget spinner apps combined across the Apple App Store and Google Play. One app is by far leading the pack  — Fidget Spinner from Ketchapp, a French video game company owned by Ubisoft, has reached 7 million downloads in about two weeks, Mashable first reported. For comparison, Pokemon Go, another mobile app that not too long ago swept schools nationwide, had 10 million downloads in a week.

Last week, Ketchapp’s Fidget Spinner game was in the No. 1 spot in the iTunes App Store as the most downloaded free iOS app. The app displays a fidget spinner on the screen and users need to swipe to spin — swiping faster to increase speed. Users can earn coins for their spins and use these to unlock other fidget spinners in the app.   

To learn more about the app, watch the video below. The game is available for free for iOS and Android.

About the Author

Sri Ravipati is Web producer for THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • teacher and children working with a LEGO Education Science kit

    LEGO Education Debuts Science Kits for Hands-on Learning

    LEGO Education has announced a new learning solution to engage students in hands-on science learning. Available in three kits by grade band, LEGO Education Science provides 120-plus standards-aligned science lessons, teacher materials, and select LEGO bricks and hardware.

  • futuristic VR goggles with blue LED accents, placed in front of a fantastical landscape featuring glowing hills, a shimmering river, and floating islands under a twilight sky

    Los Angeles Unified School District Adopts VR Learning Platform, Resources

    Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) recently announced a partnership with Avantis Education to bring educational virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) solution ClassVR to its students. A news release reports that the district has already deployed more than 16,000 ClassVR headsets as part of the Los Angeles Unified Instructional Technology Initiative.

  • computer with a red warning icon on its screen, surrounded by digital grids, glowing neural network patterns, and a holographic brain

    Report Highlights Security Concerns of Open Source AI

    In these days of rampant ransomware and other cybersecurity exploits, security is paramount to both proprietary and open source AI approaches — and here the open source movement might be susceptible to some inherent drawbacks, such as use of possibly insecure code from unknown sources.

  • stylized illustration of an open laptop displaying the ChatGPT interface

    'Early Version' of ChatGPT Windows App Now Available

    OpenAI has introduced a new ChatGPT Windows desktop app, about five months after the macOS version became available.