Media Macaroni

I’ve had a lot of luck entertaining Olive in a pinch with my iPhone. Etch-a-Sketch and Koi Pond are often a big hit. And, of course, Katamari.   

Imagine my surprise while trolling the blogosphere on the discovery of iPhone apps that might teach her a thing or two, even more than the wisdom of Mr. T in the iPity app. Check out these goods and you’ll see what I mean:

• Geekdad - Review: Early Childhood iPhone App Says ‘I See Ewe’
• Geekdad - Review – ABC Animals Teaches Kids to Write Using iPhone
• Geekdad - iPhone App Review: Peekaboo Barn is Basic Fun and Learning For Your Kids
• Ars Technica - Review: Alphabetic for iPhone offers animated alphabet fun
• Out With The Kids - OWTK Reviews iPhone Apps for Kids – Part 1
• Mommy Bits - Top 10 Free iPhone Applications For Kids

So, I started downloading all the preschool games I could get my hands on. I ended up with a bunch of games that aren’t even worth the time to download them, with extraordinarily low production values, but hidden among them are some gems. Of the list above, Peekaboo Barn ($1.99) is my favorite. It has animal names and sounds in both English and Spanish, along with some tips of how to use the app with your child. 

The best game I’ve found so far is Cute Math ($0.99). Yes, you heard me right. Math that’s cute, for under a buck! Your little one can count baby penguins, pick the right amount of apples to put in a basket, move some happy birds around to solve addition problems, and drop apples off a tree to solve subtraction problems. The best feature of this game is the modeling involved – all of the cute animals and objects become manipulatives that you can move around to help solve the problem. For instance, for the problem 3 + 4 = ___, there are 3 happy birds on one wire, and 4 happy birds on another. One tap of the screen sends all of the birds to one wire, and your child can easily count the birds altogether. Good stuff. Did I mention that it’s also cute?

Another nice app is Preschool Adventure ($0.99), where you get the choice of 5 games: colors, body, matching, shapes, and sound, all of which have nicely created, clear interfaces. For colors, tap on a splotch of color and a matching sea animal will appear with voice-over, such as “green sea turtle.” To learn body parts, tap on the screen and watch parts of a monkey assemble. Shapes pop up out of planet craters, and tapping on an animal in the barnyard will play it’s sound. For matching, it’s an exquisite corpse model using different animal heads, bodies, and feet. Slide around each part to change the creature. Match up the three parts properly to see a reward animation.  

I’ll be on the lookout for more great iPhone apps for kids, and if you’ve seen some please send them my way!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 5:41 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.