FirstWords: Vehicles (3 stars)

FirstWords Vehicles is an educational app good for preschool age and above, focusing on phonics to educate kids on letter pronunciation and the construction of basic words.

Replay Value:

With over 26 vehicles, a simple touch navigation, and “instantly ready” welcome screen, Firstwords: Vehicles is easy to pick up and play.  And, the learning curve is low for even younger audiences.  Even for children who do not know their letters, the app can be a simple matching game.  More adept younger players and older kids will begin to associate the sounds with the correct letters.  By dragging scrabble-like letter tablets across the screen, your child will be able to learn letter sounds and the basic mechanics of words.  We applaud the simplifcity and getting the fundamentals of interactive education right.  Don’t expect a lot of bells and whistles, this app is leans more toward education than game — and we’re OK with that!

Opportunities for Improvement;

The app does not rotate or scale to fit the landscape orientation of an iPad.  This is a minor issue, but it would be nice to hold the iPad lengthwise to play with the app.  Also, completing a correctly spelled word does not “unlock” a special animation of the vehicle, the images all do the same thing: spin.  We’d like to see future versions bring more interactivity and animations for the vehicles.  Maybe they could drive off the screen or spin their wheels.

Rating (3 stars out of 4)

Good fun and great educational aspects to this app.  It’s well designed with kids in mind and worth the price.  Grab this app and start spelling!

Callaway Digital  is quickly becoming a name for quality in the children’s app space, with yet another great translation of a popular children’s icon: Thomas the Train.  In “Thomas and Friends Misty Island Rescue,” 5 separate game modes are included to keep your tot entertained: an illustrated book, a mini TV episode, virtual coloring book, puzzle game and a 1-2-3 sequence game.  At the 5-dollar price point, it’s easy to assume each mini-app is worth about 1 dollar each.  As with most parents, you’ll find some apps hold greater interest depending on the little hands holding the iPad.  Regardless of how you do the math, this app is great value.

Replay Value:

Similar to Miss Spider’s Tea party, the first thing you will notice is that, pixel for pixel, this app was designed with an iPad in mind with incredibly crisp graphics.  A feature that most parents may not immediately appreciate is the innovative navigation design.  The developers at Callaway Digital creatively re-purposed an interactive railroad crossing sign as the menu throughout the app.  This central navigation is present in each mini-game so you can navigate your way home, and our 3-year-old immediately picked it up.

The illustrated book is quite detailed and has much more depth than the TV episode.  The book is 23 pages long, and the TV episode is a primarily a sing-along that lasts 2 minutes and 15 seconds.  To be sure, the book content is for kids who love Thomas the Train.  The plot is detailed, almost to the point of making the story inaccessible to kids who are not die-hard fans.  And, this was an indication to us the story portion of this app caters to older kids, while the other areas can entertain kids as young as 2.

For the more interactive apps: the virtual coloring book is an improved, streamlined version of the one we first saw in Miss Spider’s Tea Party — but it lacks the feature where kids can force the app to color within the lines (another indication this app is for older kids).  The puzzle game is a standard “arrange the pieces to unlock a brief animation,” and is a delight if you have not seen it before.  Lastly, there is a 1-2-3 game that teaches your child to tap a sequence of numbers around the border of a character, and reveals that character once the last number is tapped.  Your child will get some help, since the next number to tap in the game will glow green for a moment.

Opportunities for Improvement;

This is a highly-polished, excellent app for fans of the Thomas the Train franchise.  However, kids who don’t already enjoy the show might not make it through the 23-page story, which is quite detailed at points.  Also, if your child likes to reach and touch the iPad, the sub-menu at the bottom of the page can be a bit “slippery” and quickly skip to other pages.

Most of the value in the app is concentrated in the book, so you want to make sure your child is a fan of Thomas before purchasing.

Rating (4 stars out of 4)

Is your child a fan of Thomas the Train?  Do you have an app in your library by Callaway Digital yet?  We highly recommend this app to parents branching out into premium children’s apps outside the 1-dollar range.  You will be amazed by the quality, as this truly is a great addition to your library of kids educational apps!

Cupcakes! is a simple, but detailed app that helps you make a cupcake step by step.  Yes, the joy of eating a delicious cupcake is missing, but this app is still fun.

This app is for younger tots, and it inspires creativity by painting on toppings to your freshly made cupcakes.  Look carefully, and this is one of the best drawing apps out there for young preschoolers.

Replay Value:

The replay value here is in the variety and simplicity of making cupcakes with your fingers (without the mess!).  At it’s core, this is a drawing app with very basic guidelines: just aim for the top of the cupcake.  And, you get more creative coloring tools than other comparable apps or mini games.  The value is that instead of crayons, you get candy, frosting and other toppings.  This helps provide the fine motor skill training we love from drawing apps, but the creative use of sweet ingredients keeps the child’s attention longer than crayons or colored pencils.

The next best game that we’ve seen with a true coloring app, or “virtual coloring book” is Tam and Tao in Numberland.

Also there is a sharing feature to send your cupcakes over email.  In testing, we had a hoot sending grandma a fresh cupcake with chocolate frosting and jellybeans.  We realize this isn’t a feature we’ll use every day, but at 99 cents this was a fun add-in.

Lastly, the quality of the images is just right.  The pictures are sharp like a food magazine, but have a nice cut-out quality like an Eric Carle illustration.

Opportunities for Improvement;

The main setback with this app is the reliance on iOS pop-up alerts.  When the app prompts you to pull the cupcakes from the oven or add a topping, the message is presented in a window that looks like an alert from another app or an incoming text message, not a native communication matching the look and feel of the app itself.

To improve upon the next version of this app, it might be fun to expand upon the drawing aspect and allow users to do more “free form’ drawing to add mountains of icing or candy sculptures to the tops of the cupcakes.

Rating (4 stars out of 4)

This app is tons of fun and the price is right!  Great creative execution, and we love the dialogue from drawing cupcake toppings with our fingers!

Tam & Tao are two pint-size explorers who act as your guide through Numberland, a beautifully drawn world of education and adventure.  This app is affiliated with the Montesori method of learning, popularized by Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori.  At it’s core, Montesori strives to enable the true learning nature of children through self-directed activity (or so Wikipedia tells us).  To that end, there are definitely some nice self-directed, exploration aspects of Tam & Tao.

Replay Value:

The scenes are wonderfully constructed and have a three-dimensional appearance that is hard to describe.  The drawings feel like a mix between construction paper cut-outs and claymation, with tons of depth in the variety of characters that appear and interact with each scene.  Take for example the cave “level” where you need to tap the explorers to turn on their lights, behind them is a monster that actually scared our 3-year-old tester!

Tam and Tao themselves each bring up special windows when tapped.  Tam (or is it Tao?) will teach you how to count the number using an animated progress bar that passes horizontally through integer markers.  Tao (or is it Tam?) will show how to draw the actual number, with a drawing space to the right which give your child colored pencils and an eraser to practice.  This is hands-down, the best drawing mini-app we’ve seen.  It’s dead simple, and the design is astutely centered around the basic needs of a preschooler.  This is a big success where other apps have failed.

Opportunities for Improvement;

The names of the characters?  Similar to the “Mathaliens” from the ABC series, we wonder why apps try to brand themselves with characters that have no established identity outside of the app.  We appreciate the need for differentiation, but the names Tim and Tao themselves are meaningless, unless we can someday expect to see them in a sequel?

When testing we noticed a slight shudder effect from loading images, perhaps this is a limitation of the iPad or the app i trying to load too many simultaneous visual elements.

Lastly, and probably the biggest drawback is the sound quality of narrations and enunciation of words.  We are 100% in support of teaching non-English languages to young children, as research shows it is a great time to for second language exposure.  However, words are spoken in English with such a thick accent that they are often mispronounced or slurred, and it takes away from the experience.  Generally speaking, we are fans of adult voice-overs in children’s apps.  In the case of Tam & Tao, the audio portion is the least polished aspect of the app.

Rating (3 stars out of 4)

While there are some downsides to Tam & Tao like the audio quality and the quirky names of the characters, some aspects of this app really shine like the depth of the scenes and the drawing mini-app.  If your child doesn’t have a favorite number counting app, this is worth a shot.

Peekaboo Forest is a basic “hide-n-seek” game featuring visuals from minimalist artist Charley Harper.  We had never heard of Charley Harper before, but now appreciate his work and self-described “minimal realism” through this app.  Designed for pre-schoolers, this simple app is a tour through a tree stump, a grassy spot, a hollow tree and a pile of logs.  If you see a little movement, tap the screen to find an animal.

Replay Value:

The simple drawings of the animals is a nice contrast from other kids apps, and the sound effects are crisp and fun when you tap them.  We also liked the funky beat in between scenes.

Opportunities for Improvement;

One of the first issues we noticed with this app were the designs.  While they are simple and modern, where are the bright colors and friendly eyes to entice young readers?  It seems the designs were meant to appeal to adults with their moody color palette and dark shadows.

Also, aside from a  few instances most of the animals don’t “animate” they exist in a single frame that floats on the screen.  For example, the signature fox that makes up the app’s logo is just a floating head without a body.

Lastly, the brevity of the game was a bit surprising.  Only four scenes?  There are several apps that you can pick up for a lower price that offer more interaction and playtime.

Rating (2 stars out of 4)

Even with a few more scenes and more lively, animated animals, we’re not sure that Charley Harper’s designs are the best fit for a kid’s app.  We loved his designs, and truly we appreciate the exposure to his work — we just wouldn’t recommend their use in an educational app or storybook for kids.

Meet Flick, the littlest fire engine in a crew of rescue vehicles that roam about town.  Readers will immediately notice the illustration style has a retro feel, as this app is based on a 1948 story by Bert Reisfield.  For us, we were delighted by the 1950′s style vehicles with white wall tires and brightly colored paint jobs.

Flick follows the predictable path of zero to hero, where he begins his quest as the fire truck too small to help extinguish big fires.  Rather than focusing on his journey to become worthy of joining the team, this book details the  moment Flick experiences a literal “trail by fire” when his own fire station is set ablaze.  The lesson here is that the moments to be brave sometimes choose you, rather than you choosing them.

Replay Value:

We loved the old-fashioned story and sing-along page that sounds like it is being played on a record player.  The song was actually the favorite part of the book for our toddler tester.  And, it may have been whistled around the house a time or two by this adult reviewer.  The book and the song are the real draw here, and we enjoyed high quality illustrations and narration.  There is something special about the touch and smell of an old book, but there is also an appeal to a children’s book from 70 years ago that has been preserved perfectly.  Each page has the ability to become a virtual coloring book, but more on that in the next section.

Opportunities for Improvement:

User interaction design presented a few issues with this app.

When the reader presses play. the story reads beautifully with Sam Neil’s voice.   Touch anything, anywhere on the screen and the story stops.  You will need to tap and drag diagonally (similar to highlighting a book in the iBooks app) for the book to begin reading again.  However, it will only read the highlighted section and then stop.  So if your young child touches the screen, it’s up to you to highlight the remainder of the story.  Do a messy job of highlighting, and Sam Neil will blurt out a sentence fragment.  If your child touches the screen again, you have to highlight it again.  We assume this is part of the patented “QBook” technology the developer uses to publish books on iOS devices.  One additional issue we had with the interaction design was when a page converted to “coloring book” mode, it was very difficult to switch on or off.

Another small note was that the audio snippets featuring the narrator’s voice sometimes begins with a hiccup or high pitched audio artifact.  You will notice these things if you have to restart pages several times, due to the interaction design mentioned above.

And lastly, the sound effects from touching the story are often faint and seem like very distance background noises.  This is a minor nit, but it would seem that when touching the screen halts the entire story, we assumed the sound effects would be louder and more interesting.  Otherwise, why not let them play faintly in the background without disrupting the narration?

Rating (3 stars out of 4)

We loved the story and we could live with the QBook software that brings it to life.  If you have a young child, you may just ask them to sample all of the sounds on each page before starting the narration.  This way, it’s not up to you to start and stop at different points.  That said, the content is great and we really enjoyed this app!  We look forward to future books and Qbook updates.

As a review blog that strives to remain objective and steer parents toward the best kids educational apps and E-books, we wrestled with the idea of posting a review with a very low rating.  After all, many children’s app “review” websites assign 4 or 5 stars to everything, making it difficult to tell which apps are truly the best.  To make matters more confusing, a press release from a developer is often masked as an editorial review, which is not fair to parents.

Furthermore, we have even higher standards for E-books than games.  Here’s why: a children’s book on an iPad should be a good book on its own, and an even better experience electronically.  Otherwise, what is the point of replacing paper books at bedtime?

Unfortunately for Mr. Pinkerton, we found that the book content was lacking and the digital execution was also sub-par.  For more details on why this is the case, along with constructive tips on how to avoid the same mistakes, keep reading.

Mr. Pinkerton is an overweight pig who dreams of life outside the barn.  His dream of going for a walk is detailed in his thoughts for the reader, and only later realized when a storm knocks down a fence and sets him free.

Replay Value:

To be honest, we only played this book three or four times.  Once was a quick run with our 3-year-old, a second time to critically view the content, and a third time to try and comprehend the overall story and validate our initial poor reaction.

In our view, this app in its current state does not present a high degree of replay value as a story or an educational app.

Opportunities for Improvement:

From a pure grammatical standpoint, the overuse of parenthetical expressions is puzzling (If the thought doesn’t relate to the story, why include it?).  The overall sentence construction is also awkward, and at times feels like the story may have been originally written in another language and then translated to English.

For example, here is the entire text from page two: “He was fat the same way the grass is green and the sky is blue.”  What does this mean?  If your child asked you, how would you explain this sentence?

The message that obesity is natural and that simply dreaming is enough to realize your goals is a a viewpoint with which we politely disagree.

Visually, there are some pages that show the characters in a 2-frame infinite loop or just floating around in circles — as if a software glitch has them perpetually moving.  Also the illustrations themselves are above-average, but vary dramatically in quality.  Mr. Pinkerton is well-drawn and cute in some pages, but in later sections of the book he and other characters appear hastily put together (the sun and the moon).  Contrast this with the drawings in games like Splish Splash Inn, and you see the difference between an app feeling “indie” and amateurish.

Technically, you will really start to feel this a homemade app that lacks the polish of an experienced developer.  Page swipe gestures are not used, in exchange for small buttons on the bottom left and right of the page.  The volume icon in the upper right of the screen is a loose combination of a triangle and a rectangle, as if thrown together in an afterthought.  And lastly, the app includes “Sleep Mode.”   Why?  Is this for parents who leave the iPad in their child’s room after story time, only to wake and begin reading again?  This is an odd feature to add to a book and we were scratching our heads to think of good reasons to include it.

To make matters worse, the app finally crashed when testing the “physics” of tilting the screen and watching the characters animate.

Rating (1 star out of 4)

We appreciate the time and effort it takes to develop an app, promote it and generate sales.  However, without a significant update from the developer, we do not recommend purchasing Mr. Pinkerton.

Our sincere hope is that the developers take this criticism constructively and go on to produce a great app for their target audience.

Animal Train is a fun educational game for pre-school age and up, and features a rambling cartoon train that traverses 7 areas and collects (with the help of your fingers) more than 40 different animals.  Test your child’s memory, recognition and fine motor skills to capture the animals and drop them into the train.  The difficulty increases when multiple animals need to be found, and each must be located and placed onto the moving train.

Replay Value:

Your child will want to play this game because of the fun illustrated locations around the cartoon world of Animal Train.  There is also an opportunity to set context for your child about what animals live where and why.  We loved the fact that the ocean characters have their own special train cars that resemble fish tanks on wheels — very clever!

Furthermore, the memory aspect of this game presents an interesting contrast to the flip cards we see in other games like Miss Spider’s Tea Party and Monkey Preschool Lunchbox.  In Animal Train HD, the player must listen for up to 3 animal names, retain that list in their memory and then drag them onto the train before it leaves the screen.  In testing, our 3 year old had difficulty when trying to remember the second or third animal in time to drop the animal in the train.

Opportunities for Improvement:

We have grown to really enjoy and appreciate the development quality of games from 22learn.  However, we did not particularly care for the first screen of the app being an advertisement for other apps.  This takes away from some children’s ability to start the game immediately.

Other than the large advertisement at the start of the app, we really enjoyed the variety of animals and locations in Animal Train, and the cleverness with which the app presents an educational challenge.  It’s not just the same kinds of mini-games with different graphics, it really is a new kind of game (compared to the other apps we’ve seen).

Rating (4 stars out of 4)

Note that at the time of this review, Animal Train HD is iPad-only, and we feel the price point of $1.99 is more than fair value for the quality of the game and the learning value. The graphics, narration and music are all top notch just like our experience with other apps by this developer.  If your child loves animals and trains like ours does, you may want to go for it and purchase this excellent app!

Splish Splash Inn is a small hotel where fish and other aquatic creatures share a home under the ocean.  Starfish, eels, clams and sharks all live comfortably in numbered rooms and will play sounds when you find them.  When you enter a room in the inn, the number of the room is narrated and the characters will zip horizontally across the screen and announce their sequence “1, 2, 3…” to the user.  The simple, matte ocean characters look like cutouts of construction paper and we love the melodies your tot can make by tapping them.

Replay Value:

First off, we love the starting menu.  One of the first tests of an app designed for kids is the learning curve of starting and engaging when the app is first opened.  Right away, you will be introduced to a snappy animation of a fish travelling to Splish Splash Inn.  The animation is smooth and there is no shutter effect like you sometimes see with virtual books.  Immediately, it feels like a Nickolodeon mini-tv episode with the clever art and fun musical beat.  The artwork by Divya Srinivasan is minimalistic and professional, and each ocean creature is very easily recognizable.

Our two-and-a-half year old tester provided another clue that our adult eyes (and ears) missed: the fun tunes you can make by tapping creatures in the rooms with higher numbers.  Our tester loved the bongo drums from the turtles, the whimsy tones of the starfish, and the electro-pop sounds from the jellyfish.

Lastly, and perhaps overlooked at first, was the use of the accelerometer.  When tilting the iPad or iPhone, the characters on screen will “float” to the top, as if you just picked up the Splish Splash Inn like a fish tank and wanted to carry it away.

Opportunities for Improvement;

It’s hard to ask for more from an app that costs 99 cents.  We felt that Splish Splash Inn provides a lot of fun for a buck, but we did have that creeping parental feeling of “How long will my kid play with this?”  You get what you pay for, and in this equation, you get back a lot of value from Splish Splash Inn.

We can’t help ourselves from providing a few extra pointers — since we love the combo of illustrations, music and technical know-how from Shortstack:  In upcoming releases from this developer, we’d like to see the same simple design, musical melodies and snappy user interface applied to other mini games.  Perhaps a matching game or even a screen that shows all of the creatures and lets the child hear all of the musical sounds at once?  Or, have the creatures play a song no matter what order you tap them?

Rating (4 stars out of 4)

This one is a no-brainer.  At the time of this review, Splish Splash Inn cost $.99, and you should definitely snag a copy for your mobile device.

My Ocean Friends has an “indie” feel with lush watercolor graphics behind a 3D whale that takes the user through 8 screens of interactive content.

Replay Value:

Can you hear the steel drums?  The first thing we noticed was the fun island beat playing in the background of this app.  Soon enough you will be introduced to “big blue whale” the narrator and main character.  The developers did a good job of blending a 3D animation with the watercolor illustrations.  “Blue” will take you through a basic storybook adventure under the ocean.  Tapping the ocean plants and animals around the whale will prompt a second voice to speak its name.  Some pages are limited to just tapping the sea creatures to learn their names, others feature mini-games like a puzzle, virtual coloring book and bubble piano game.

Opportunities for Improvement;

While the puzzle mini-game randomly generates new pieces each time it is loaded, the turtle “what color am I?” game does not change (spoiler: the turtle is green every time).  We have seen this in other kid’s apps, where some app mini-games are better at holding attention than others.  Additionally, we found that the navigation might be difficult to understand for a younger child and they may not realize how many hidden buttons are waiting in the cute watercolor drawings.  Lastly, we would have preferred an option to immediately begin tapping the ocean scene, without having to wait for the whale character to read through each word on the page.

Rating (3 stars out of 4)

At the time of this review, the price of this app was $2.99, on the high end compared to similar apps like Fish School HD which costs $1.99.  However, with “My Ocean Friends” you are getting high quality hand-drawn watercolor illustrations and fun island music to tap away to.  This could be a fun starter app for parents and kids new to the iPad, while more experienced users will be looking for a little bit more depth in the mini games for the price point.