About a year and a half ago, I stumbled onto Word World, a cartoon produced by PBS Kids.  I was instantly drawn in as much as my kids, with the cartoon’s engaging visuals and quirky characters.  And the best part?

The show is educational!!!  The animals and objects are physically made of their letters (see image of Pig),  and every episode focuses on one mission:”Let’s build a word!”

Admitting my bias before I review the app, I can honestly say Word World is one of the best kids shows I’ve ever seen.  Word World has a lot of power to shape the edutainment app-sphere.

Like the show, the app (Build a word) is focused on building words, which are transformed into objects with a simple pinch of the captured letters.  The app concept is perfectly consistent with the mission of each episode: find the right letters to build the word at hand. The fun part is trying to grab the letters as they bounce around the screen!

At first, my little ones struggled with the app’s functionality.  It was difficult for them to grab the letters, and they occasionally lost the letters while dragging them into the slots.  Their clunky little fingers quickly got better, however, and the challenge now is keeping my kids entertained by the relatively small number of words to spell.

The Word World app makes kids forget they’re learning to read, and at a 99¢ pricetag, it is more than a steal.

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Considering an iPad and interested in what kind of educational content is out there for kids? Here are some of the best and most popular apps – which, when taken as a whole, present a compelling case for the role of the device as an educational tool. Let us know what other apps your kids love in the comments — there’s a lot of great content out there, and not all of it ends up at the top of the App Store listings. But here are some of the apps that did…

Top Educational Kids iPad Apps in the App Store

Star Walk is one of those special apps that delivers upon the iPad’s promise of being a “magical” device. You may in fact have already seen this one — it won the Apple Design Awards in 2010 and was featured among the best iPhone apps of 2009. The iPad version continues to provide great astronomical information — but the real “wow’ of this app is the fact that it delivers a full screen augmented reality view of the heavens that rotates as you move your iPad around — turning it into a super-powered virtual telescope.

Strongly recommended both for experienced star gazers and the youngest observers of the heavens. (Although the littlest Gallileo wannabes may need a bit of help..) You can get it from the App Store here.


Honorable Mention: If you’re looking for other fantastic astronomy apps, both Mars Globe HD and Solar Walk 3D Solar System are great.








Fish School HD continues Duck Duck Moose’s strong tradition of producing quality kids educational apps for the iOS platform. Like their previous iPhone mega-hits, Wheels on the Bus and Itsy Bitsy Spider, Fish School HD features strong animations that can help engage kids in a learning experience. This app features a dynamic school of fish that swims into place to display letters, numbers and shapes — and, like a well-trained aquatic marching band, the fish are perfectly synced with the accompanying music. Fish School HD guides kids through different learning modes and periodically rewards them with free play with the fish. If you’re looking to help kids learn letters, numbers, and shapes, it’s hard to go wrong with this one.
You can get it from the App Store here.






Math Bingo has been one of the hottest kids apps in recent weeks and has been extensively featured by Apple — but in case you missed it, Math Bingo is wonderfully focused on a simple concept — you answer math problems to fill spots on a bingo board. This drill-style learning is complemented by adorable little “bingo bugs” that you place on your board as you correctly answer problems. Once you win a round you are awarded a bingo bug to keep and then given the chance to play with it for a bit — not only by touching it, but also by moving your iPad around and triggering the accelerometer. Great fun and a great reward for learning. My three year old isn’t quite ready for this yet, but apps like this one and Math Ninja are driving her curiosity around this whole “math” thing. Last night she spent an hour with me asking questions like what is 3+4 and 5+2 and 1+4 and on and on.. Anything that engages my daughter in learning like that is a tool I want in her life. If you’re interested you can get it from the App Store here.






Full disclosure here – Build A Zoo is our app, and we’re proud of it – but you don’t have to take our word for the fact that it is among the best kids learning apps for the iPad – Apple named it a “New & Notable” education app just the day after it was released. Build A Zoo features six different learning games that kids can play to earn animals for their zoo. The included games help develop a nice balance of skills including spelling, memory, matching, as well as timing and fine motor skills. Interested in seeing what your kids think? We’ve got some promo codes for free copies of the app that we’d be happy to share with you, our loyal readers — just let us know in the comments..
Or, you can get it from the App Store here.








There’s absolutely no doubting the fact that Cookie Doodle is an incredibly engaging app. Kids love to play house – and this app lets them bake and decorate cookies without the mess. Trust us – if your kids like baking real cookies, they’ll love this too. We have seen some comments in user reviews that this app is void of educational content — but we disagree. If you’re looking for apps to help your kids get a jumpstart on reading, writing and arithmetic, than this probably isn’t the best app for you. But if you believe the process of going through a self-guided yet structured creative exercise can help your child learn to think, than this is probably an excellent app to add to your child’s collection. Just be prepared to help eat the virtual cookies.. You can get it from the App Store here.






Math Board is a classic – one of those apps that validates our claim that mobile devices are the modern chalkboard. This app takes that idea quite literally – math problems appear and you have the ability to work them out by hand on the virtual chalkboard. The app features deep options for customizing both the type of problems you want to answer and the overall quiz. Further it also stores your quiz results and displays them in an easy to see dashboard. Perhaps the best part of this app is it’s ability to deliver value across a wide range of learning levels. Depending upon the child, it’s easy to see this being useful as a regular learning tool for kids from as young as 4 to as old as 13 — and not many apps can make that claim.
You can get it from the App Store here.






Color & Draw is a modern coloring book. It includes a wide variety of line drawings that kids can color in, as well as stickers that can be added to drawings, and the ability to import images and draw on them. The app’s user interface is simple and clean and easy for little kids to figure out — meaning you don’t have to fight with the technology at all and can instead get straight to the fun of coloring. Color & Draw also makes it easy for you to save and share images — meaning that even if junior’s next masterpiece doesn’t end up on on gramma’s fridge, it may end up on her desktop. Sound like fun?
You can get it from the App Store here.






The Cat in the Hat has always been a classic, and it’s only gotten better on the iPad. The iPad version will read to you, or let you read and explore the story yourself along the way. Really, the magic here is the story – but the occasional convenience of having the book read itself and the fun of being able to interact with story elements gives this version a freshness beyond any paper copy.
You can get it from the App Store here.





123 World Geography is both a guided coloring exercise and a great introduction to geography. It’s best explained by watching the demo built into the app, but the essence of it is that you get to color in a wide range of maps. Once you’ve finished coloring in your map, you can also easily save or share your colorful cartography with friends. A great app for the kids in the car on any road trip.
You can get it from the App Store here.











Super Why is a favorite of many kids from the PBS Kids series. Their app is true to the series – with classic characters each hosting their own game, including sentence completion, rhyming, spelling and a letter hunt. The visual look of this is obviously top-notch and the learning games are of obvious educational value. Some reader reviews seem to indicate that there’s been some instability with this app – but I’m happy to say that I’ve not been able to crash my iPad with it. Which is lucky, because our kids love it.

This list is based on a mix of our personal take and iTunes App Store data as of early June ‘10. We’re confident all of these are truly great iPad apps for kids — but we’re not convinced our list is completely comprehensive. Although the situation has improved greatly since we put together our list of Top 20 Kids Educational Apps for the iPhone, the nature of the App Store still makes it easy for some great apps to slip through the cracks and makes it even harder for them to ever get rediscovered. On that note – are your kids using any great educational iPad apps that you love that you don’t see on this list?

Let us know — we’d love to feature some reader favorites here.

Do share.

(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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We just launched our most recent kids educational app yesterday – and today it ranks among the top twenty educational iPad apps. The app is called Build A Zoo and features six different educational games that help kids improve their spelling, memory, and coordination skills.

Some of the included games include:

Monkey Letter Scramble
Match letters to spell a word and then watch the monkey dance. Letters are spoken when touched and words are spoken when all letters have been matched.

Bird Card Flip
Flip cards to match birds. Helps develop memory and matching skills.

Polar Bear Bowling
Help the polar bears knock down penguin pins — a light-hearted game that helps kids practice their timing.

Elephant Mindreading
Toddlers have to find the person in the crowd that the elephant is thinking about. Great for matching and object recognition.

Turtle Race
Toddlers have to be quick to help the turtle win this race. They need to press a button to power their turtle — and develop fine motor skills along the way.

Dolphin Beach Ball
Drag the dolphin to catch the falling balls and keep them out of the water. Great for working on both timing skills and coordination.

If you’re interested in a promo code, let us know — we’ve got a few to give away still.

But really we just wanted to celebrate today, so we thought we’d share this amazing elephant with you.

Quite something, huh? My daughter and I watched it together – and now she wants to go see an elephant. Off to the zoo we go..

And again – if you’re interested in a free copy of Build A Zoo, just let us know in the comments..

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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In case you missed it, the New York Times ran a story that covered the research of Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and SeIf. In particular, the piece focused on her recent research which found that heavy parental use of technology is associated with feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition among kids. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books. The thrust of the story was:

Child-development researchers are concerned that smartphones, instant messaging and Twitter are creating distracted parents.

On the face of it, this may seem to be a plausible perspective. Mobile devices are undeniably having a significant impact on how we connect, learn, socialize, and parent. The article certainly seemed to resonate. Links to it were splashed across social media today, and one our local papers – the Star Tribune – saw fit to put the article on the front page of their print edition.

To be frank, we find the perspective advanced in the article to be both disturbing and counterproductive. We do not mean to minimize the fact that people are busy, overstimulated, and overconnected. They are. We also do not want to discourage a communal conversation around how technology fits in our life.

Our problem is the way that this article framed up the discussion – leading with the idea that plugged-in parents are alienating their kids misses all of the benefits that technology can bring to family life. My daughter learned her ABCs on an iPhone. My son can videochat with his European grandparents via Skype. My grandmother keeps track of the whereabouts of her entire brood via Facebook. She’s close to 90 years old and almost blind – but technology keeps her connected to us all. These are not small victories for technology or for our family — they are major victories. And they are happening every day in families all across the world.

This article misses all of these victories in its rush to proclaim that technology is alienating us from each other. And on the basis of what evidence? A qualitative analysis of 300 people? Really? It may be a vain hope, but I truly would like to believe that one of our nation’s flagship media outlets would look for more robust data and a better balance in perspective before running a story like this that has deep implications for the role that technology plays in our lives.

We believe there’s more promise in focusing on the opportunities that smartphones create for kids and families.

Fast Company’s recent cover story on how smartphones are impacting learning is worth considering as a counterpoint to the NYT article. Other examples of the positive impact of technology on kids are not lacking – in fact they are everywhere. Students in Tennessee are benefiting from mobile learning. So are students in the UK. As are students from Singapore to Texas.

Our point is not that smartphones (or any technology) are a magic cure for what ails society. But we do believe that all technology is a tool that can be applied for good or ill, and that it up to us to define how the technology fits into our life.

Fear-mongering articles like today’s NYT’s piece are dangerous precisely because they have the potential to blind us all to the good that can come from a smart use of technology.

Worst of all – coming from a publication on the defensive about the impact of the Internet on their revenue stream – this just tastes like a bit of technology-bashing sour grapes. Especially when it’s immediately on the heels of the New York Times clipping the heels of some talented student developers for “stealing” their content. Don’t get me wrong – I love the New York Times. I just hope for more from them in the future. There is an opportunity to show people how technology can positively impact us – and it’s a story that can not only sell papers but also lead the way to a better future. Here’s hoping they take up that challenge.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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A few weeks ago I got my wife an iPad for our anniversary. In what seems to be a fairly common occurence for many early adopter families, it’s been tough to get it back from our kids since it arrived. Besides having fun with the oversized versions of their old favorites from the iPhone, they’ve got a few new favorites on the iPad. One of these is My Numbers, from Punflay and EMANTRAS.

My Numbers reminds me of some of the toys I grew up with – the form factor of the iPad definitely allows for a different kind of learning experience than is possible with iPhone apps and for the digital reinvention of some classic toys.
At it’s core, My Numbers is a simple counting experience that allows kids to master their numbers by practicing with objects, colors and sounds. Touch an object, and the appropriate number is spoken. Touch a number, and the appropriate objects light up. Spin the color wheel, and the colors of the app change. Perhaps best of all, the navigation has been optimized for the youngest learners – which is part of why I think our kids come back to this app. They don’t spend any time fighting through menus or navigation — they simply push the oversized buttons and get to explore the wide world of numbers.

Kudos to the My Numbers team for a solid kid-focused, educational iPad offering. If you’re interested, you can get it here. And, as always, if you’ve got other favorite educational apps for the iPhone or iPad, please do let our readers know in the comments.

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Current standardized tests are:

a) A simplistic way of assessing learning outcomes
b) Culturally biased
c) Responsible for “teaching to the test”
d) Narrow in their focus
e) All of the above

I’m sure that when first introduced, scantron forms seemed like a wonderful invention.   The technology simply and easily allowed many, many exams to be graded in a compressed period of time and has ultimately enabled a national, standards-based approach to learning.  Sounds great, right?  Well, perhaps, except that anyone that has taken a standardized test somewhere along the line can speak to the limits of the current approach.  The complaints are familiar — standardized tests evaluate a narrow slice of learning, standardized tests measure test-taking skills rather than true knowledge or critical thinking skills, standarized tests are culturally biased, etc.  And when you think about it – the approach is flawed.  We have built an education system that caters to standardized tests and we build standardized tests that are grounded in what a scantron machine can read.

Looking forward, we do believe that there is a better way.   Immersive, educational applications can evalutate performance as quickly as any scantron machine.   But educational applications can go further.  Quite simply, they can deliver a deeper exam experience than any paper-based test ever could.  For now, most test-related mobile applications are focused on test-prep rather than acutal test-delivery.  Many of these apps are usefuls tool for coping with our current testing system.  That said, we believe that ultimately mobile devices could be the platform that not only prepares students for tests — but also the platform that delivers and grades these tests.  We believe that mobile technology can unlock a fresh approach to testing — and that in a world obsessed with standards, we believe that a fresh approach to testing can enable a fresh approach to teaching — one that looks beyond the narrow confines of a number two pencil.

Interested in helping prepare your kids for this brave new world?  So are we.  And for today, our recommendation to you is to pick up an old classic, reimagined in modern form.  There’s nothing like The Cat in the Hat — but you’ve never seen the Cat quite like this before.

Reinvented for the iPhone and the iPad, The Cat in the Hat is a perfect way to introduce kids to both reading and to their digital futures.  You can get it here if you’re interested.

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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Almost half of the top 100-selling apps in the iTunes App Store were for preschool or elementary-aged children in November 2009, according to a content analysis by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which promotes digital media technologies to advance children’s learning.

(source)

Given the fact that the app store sells $200 million in apps each month, there’s an enormous opportunity for designers and developers to make money creating educational content.

This translates into great news for parents and kids — it should mean a huge volume of quality educational content for kids.

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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With Apple soon to announce it’s ‘latest creation,’ we have a feeling Apple’s influence on the digital world will burst forward quite a bit this year.

More specifically, the iPhone continues to show incredible upward trends, and signs point to a fantastic 2010.

If we combine our sunny iPhone forecast with the general upward mobile trends (more users, more content, more ad revenue, and, most importantly, more influence on our lives), the clarity of our mission – namely to positively impact the educational use of the iPhone – grows stronger.

We genuinely believe, despite tens of thousands of apps to discuss and millions of current users, that our conversations here at the ikids blog can make a difference, so as we move forward this year, please feel free to comment on posts or let us know better ways to mold the conversation.

Our first new year’s resolution is to get back on track with reviews…more to come soon!

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the ikids blog update

If your kids are like mine, they have been chatting about Santa nonstop for weeks.  I have also been leveraging the power of the nice list to get improved behavior out of my 3 year old

Our blog has fallen off the radar a bit because we have been focused on a Santa contest, and some soon to be released updates to our site.

The Santa Countdown is a FREE iPhone app, a website, a blog, a twitter page, a youtube channel and most importantly it gives you a chance to get on the nice list while winning over $350 in prizes!

The website currently features two games, with a final one on the way. The Santa Countdown app will be re-released either today or tomorrow, updated with two games (and therefore two chances to win prizes!). Grab a copy and go for the prizes, or the nice list…

more contests

The makers of Little Cook (review here) have informed us of a ‘Little Critics’ contest with a chance to win one of three prizes.  Because we so enjoyed their app, we are sharing a link to their contest here.

more Christmas apps

We are soon to have reviews for Night Before Christmas By Louise Grant, and X Mas Crackers.

Non-Christmas reviews are also in the works.  Cheers,

the ikids blog

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November has been a busy month for the the ikids blog, even though the blog posts have been few.  We have numerous pending reviews, so if you have requested one please continue to monitor the site. Remember, this site is a labor of love!

More importantly, we are creating a marketing platform for app developers to promote their products. This new tool will also give app users and educators a chance to weigh in on their favorite apps and to continue to improve the educational benefits of the iPhone.

Thank you for your visit and please stay tuned!

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