St Mungo’s is a charity that I have only recently become aware of. It is a charity that embraces a holistic approach to helping the homeless. They offer everything from accommodation to courses that help people retrain and enable them to go back into the job market.

I live in Bath which is a city with quite a high number of homeless people, which in this day and age in a first world country is quite shocking. All around me is affluence, grand houses and posh shops and amongst that is a large number of people that have next to nothing. It is a very visual thing, you see the homeless in and around town day and night. I am very fortunate that I have a warm home to live in so try and do my bit for others who do not. I also try and support one of the Big Issue sellers whenever I can, he is out in all winds and weathers selling his magazine.

I first heard of St Mungo’s when I got involved with World Zombie Day which has an event in London but has events all over the world in October. Essentially everyone gets dressed up as zombies and goes for a shamble around the centre of London. I raised £120 last year and hope to raise more this year. It was a really fun way to spend the day and there are activities for after the walk.

I also plonk St Mungo’s using www.ploink.co.uk this is a micro donation site where you can donate small amounts of money by using virtual piggybanks. It is a great site for those people who can’t afford a regular donation but would like to send a little as and when they can. There are many different charities that you can donate to depending on your inclination.  For me it is St Mungo’s, a dog rescue charity and a cancer charity.

Although this app is not strictly maths orientated it does have a (small) maths element to it. Essentially the games have been developed to exercise 5 areas of your brain; visual, memory, speed, problem solving and focus.

You are not directly competing with anyone but yourself although the app compares your performance to others in your gender and age group. Fit Brains does make you quite competitive with yourself as you want to improve your scores and performance thus making your Fit Brain Index increase. There are 12 different games to play, enough to keep your interest.

As I said at the beginning it isn’t strictly maths based but the idea of this app is to improve your mental agility which in turn should help your mental arithmetic skills. Apparently according to research the brain starts to age at the relatively young age of 25 so anything we can do to slow that process is good.

You can do training sessions, each session has one game containing each element and takes just a few minutes or you can choose the games you want to play freely. There are three levels within each game and as you get a certain number of points the next level unlocks. If you play freestyle you can choose your level whereas within the training sessions the level is chosen for you based on your performance. I play both ways depending on mood.

The games are visually appealing and work very well on my iPad mini and equally as well on the the standard size iPad. You can also download a computer version but it isn’t linked to the app.

I like this app for two reason, firstly to keep my brain agile and develop areas where it may be a little slow and because it is also fun.

Available on: iOS

Free version (offers in-app purchases / paid upgrade): https://itunes.apple.com/app/fit-brains-trainer/id565200595?mt=8