November 2010
The Archives
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11.30.10Moozart is a musical treat for iPad… with animals!"What does a pig sound like singing in the key of C?" begins the App Store listing for Moozart, a new iPad music app for children. What indeed. The app lets you find out. It aims to teach kids simple music principles through the medium of farmyard animals letting rip with their vocal cords. Moozart has several songs preloaded, but you can also create your own by dragging and dropping the animal icons onto a proper musical staff. Frogs, ducks, cows... they're all here, and surprisingly tuneful. Animals and music are great fun in children's iPad apps separately, but it looks like together, ...
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11.30.10Despicable Me gets a Minion Mashup app for iPhoneDespicable Me is one of the animated movies creating a buzz among parents this year. Now it's got a new iPhone app to spread the word further. It's called Despicable Me: Minion Mashup, and is described as a 'digital sticker book app'. What that means is a chance for your children to create their own collage of characters from the movie, on-screen. Characters and gadgets can be resized using intuitive touchscreen controls, and then placed onto scenes from the film. The usual sharing options are included too: Facebook and email, with images also saveable as wallpapers. A simple idea, but a fun one: ...
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11.30.10Spelling Safari teaches kids to spell their favourite animalsIf my cats are teaching my sons anything, it's that cats can move super-fast when faced with an arms-outstretched toddler shouting. Which is a lesson, I guess. However, the animals in iPhone and iPad app Spelling Safari have got a few more educational tricks up their sleeves. Or whatever the animal equivalent is. The app features 40 critters, each with a set of letter tiles spelling its name, which have to be dragged into place. The difficulty level can be tweaked to suit your child's age, and it's Universal, so works on all your Apple devices without you having to buy it more ...
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11.25.10Mixamajig brings mix and match books to the iPhoneMixamajig brings mix and match books to the iPhone with a plethora of heads, bodies, legs, feet and headgear, allowing your kids to create their very own unique characters (or ‘Kooks’). Priced at 59p ($0.99) there are more than 200 different body parts to choose from, on a variety of themes (astronaut, princess, superhero etc). Your children can add their own photos, drawings and recorded voices to the mix too. Kids will love seeing their own faces on the screen - and no doubt your face too. And of course they can upload and share their creations via email – so make ...
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11.25.10Baby Musician app puts you in charge of an animal orchestraYou can't argue with an app that features a frog playing the tuba, a koala hammering the piano, and a chicken sawing away on a violin. Especially not when it's as cute as Baby Musician. The app is available in iPhone and iPad versions, and puts your child in charge of an animal orchestra. They control when each musician plays, with songs including London Bridge, Jingle Bells and Twinkle Twinkle. The idea is to provide something fun, while also teaching them the names of some popular instruments, via mini flash cards that pop up when the musician is tapped. It's simple, but has ...
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11.25.10LoveBots lets you make a robot on iPhone or iPadYesterday, I was pretty excited about Build a Robot HD, an iPad app that lets your child construct their own virtual android on-screen. However, it's been put in the shade today by another app: LoveBots. It's the same core idea, but with beautiful production values and long-term appeal. You choose from heads, eyes, mouths, arms, legs, torsos and other robo-bits, building your bot and then giving it a name. The developers promise more than 1.3 million potential combinations, with your creations able to be uploaded to Facebook and Twitter, or saved on your iPhone or iPad ready to be emailed to friends. Having ...
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11.24.10PapaMama lets you create your own iPhone flash cardsWe've pointed out before that iPhone's App Store is stuffed with flash-card apps for kids, and that it can be hard to sort the wheat from the (enormous amounts of) chaff. One thing I've often wondered is why there aren't more apps letting you make your own cards, according to the words you want your kids to learn. Well, PapaMama does just that. You can create cards with your own text, photos and voice recordings, as well as using the preloaded illustrated cards. As the screenshot shows, your cards could have your dog, but it's also perfect for relatives and friends, or even ...
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11.24.10AlphaBELCH turns burps into child’s play for iPhone and iPadOne of my son's favourite books has a page that makes a fart noise when you press a button. He also loves Who's In The Loo, whose first page speculates that an elephant may be having a poo. Kids have a well-developed toilet humour, in other words. There's nothing you can do about it. Farts, poos and bums are all hilarious to a toddler, and this extends to burps too. So, AlphaBELCH. It's an iPhone and iPad picture book-app about animals burping, which aims to teach your child the alphabet while they chuckle at the silly sound effects. It's the work of one Stephen ...
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11.24.10Santa and the North Pole? There’s an app for that…Update: There's a brand new Portable North Pole app for Christmas 2012! AND it's portable. iPNP claims to be the Portable North Pole (hence the acronym), and offers a grab-bag of Christmas-themed activities for kids. So, that includes a virtual advent calendar, a countdown of the days until Christmas, and a pseudo-radar showing where your child is in relation to Santa's Village. (Warning, this may lead to some awkward questions when you bump into a Santa at your local shopping centre). Continue Reading...
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11.24.10Puss in Boots gets the interactive iPad storybook treatmentIt's open season on fairytales on the App Store - not least because the original authors tend to be a.) dead and b.) not entitled to demand licensing fees for their work. The results have been creative book-apps based on just about every fairytale you can name, and a few you can't. One that will certainly be familiar is Puss in Boots, which has a new iPad 'interactive storybook' this week. It offers 35 pages and 108 'interactive moments', backed by a musical soundtrack and talking characters. The visual style is bright and breezy, and given that Puss in Boots is a popular ...
recent posts
- Gry & Vitus for iPad gets our seal of approval!
- Animal Train for Toddlers is a fun ride for iPad and iPhone
- This Goldilocks app for iPad and iPhone stands out from the crowd – and is free until Monday 27th May
- Jörgits is an iPad sci-fi storybook for kids about global warming
- Dot-to-Dot Adventure on iPad lets kids of all ages get puzzly
- Symmetry School iPad app teaches geometry to kids
- Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom brings Magic School to iOS
