Last week, I received an email from Nicola of Punflay, a company that develops educational iPhone/iPad apps for kids asking whether I would be interested in reviewing any of their apps. I replied with a big 'YES' of course and mentioned that I prefer to review apps of the alphabets, numbers or story time theme as these are what Ben is into lately. Anyway, my review as below...
* Title: Kandy Fish
* Price: $1.99
* Category: Education
* Updated: Feb 01, 2012
* Version: 1.2
* Size: 58.7 MB
* Language: English
* Seller: EMANTRAS
* Rated: 4+
* Requirements: Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later.
Description from the product page:
"Dive undersea to play and learn about shapes, colors, and directions with the colorful Kandy Fish. Watch a lively video and enjoy 4 fun learning activities in this adorable 3D animated picture book from Punflay. Kandy Fish has been specially designed to teach your child, simple preschool concepts. With developmental milestones in mind, the app has been carefully crafted to introduce age-appropriate concepts in a fun and engaging interface.
Your preschooler will love watching the whimsical Kandy Fish teach them simple concepts. Play the video and watch the vibrant fish come alive on your iPad. Voiceover and text highlighting allow kids to follow the story easily. There’s even a lilting tune that little ones will want to listen many times over. Kids will have fun seeing the fish form a straight line, triangle, square, and a circle. Upward and downward arrows demonstrate the concept of up and down while the fish swim to the left and right teaching your child the concept of left and right. Not to miss how your child will love seeing the fish form a beautiful rainbow. What a fantastic way for kids to learn their colors! Also included in the app are the following 4 exciting activities that stimulate learning.
Kolor Pots - This is a color match activity that lets kids drag and drop fish in their respective colored buckets
Kandy Fun - Kandy Fun is a simple pattern recognition activity where little ones will have to figure out which fish comes next to complete the pattern.
Kandy Time - This is a great activity to develop eye-hand coordination. Kids can get a lot of practice tracing a straight line, triangle, square, circle and even directions.
Kandy Kolor - Little fingers can paint beautiful pictures using a color palette with many color choices. "
How good an iPad app to me is based on how often Ben goes back to playing and/or using it. For this app, Ben has been playing with it almost every day!
What's good?
* I love the 4 learning activities and using fishes in this app is just too cute as we have an aquarium at home, so I feel Ben is able to relate more and feel more excited playing with this app!
* I am happy to see Ben able to complete the "Kolor Pots " activity without any problems at all, he drags and drops the correct fish color into the corresponding bucket colors. Seeing him enjoying and learning at the same time just puts a smiley face to this happy mama! Hahaha!
* In "Kandy Time" activity, I try to use this opportunity to teach Ben in drawing circle, straight line, square, triangle and so on.
* Ben still needs to practise more on the "Kandy Fun" activity as he keeps getting distracted with trying to match the fish color instead of solving the fish color sequence. I think this is a good activity as it will help sharpen his memory and mind based on what he sees and thinks.
* In "Kandy Kolor" activity, Ben just draw and scribbles all he wants, as of now during Ben's drawing activity time (with paper and color pens), Ben is mastering the skill to color within the drawn shapes/picture so it's good to see Ben continues doing so on this app.
Room for Improvement?
* I'm not sure whether this can be done, but I would prefer if EACH of the learning activities started off with a sample solution so that the child (or even us!) understands what the activity's objective is. For example, under the "Kolor Pots ", it will be good if the app starts off with 1 fish being moved automatically into the correct bucket color.
* In the "Kandy Time" game, I would prefer if the tracing line color is darker as the current light gray is a bit too pale and difficult to see.
You can purchase the "Kandy Fish" app from the iTunes App Store.
I received no monetary compensation for this review, I was provided with the promo code by the sponsor to redeem the application for free from iTunes Store in order to facilitate my review. All opinions expressed in this post are my own. Please do your own research when purchasing products, as your opinions may differ from mine. And if you'd like to read my previous iPad Apps reviews, you can do so by reading this post of mine called "My iPad App Reviews"
