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iPad apps help kids master the alphabet

22.04.2011
For kids, learning the alphabet isn't exactly as easy as A-B-C. While you and I may have mastered the alphabet from books or television, children today are just as likely to study letters and their sounds with the magical multitouch device that is the iPad. My daughters (ages 4 and 2) helped me test three ostensibly educational apps. Our questions: Are they really teaching the kids anything? And perhaps even more importantly, are they fun?

My kids are iOS pros. They can unlock an iPad, swipe between screens, and launch the app they're after. The best kid-focused apps offer simple navigation, clear instructions, and easy targets for little hands to manipulate.

Apps that purport to help my kids master the alphabet should do all that and more. Beyond offering fun, engaging visuals, they should employ both lowercase and uppercase letters, associate letters with their sounds, and ideally not feel too repetitive (and thus unworthy of repeat launching).

The first app my kids and I tried out together was ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ). The $3 game from developer stars Captain Wallace, an accented character (of the non-typographic variety) who leads an alphabet expedition through a virtual zoo. The app's main menu presents a grid of colorful, clear capital letters; tapping on any visits the animal whose name begins with that letter. The approach is somewhat similar to ( Macworld rated 3 out of 5 mice ), another animal-themed ABC app that suffered from some navigation limitations when I reviewed it recently. (The Safari Animals HD 1.1 update, released after my review, added sorely needed bidirectional navigation.)