Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Review: PreSchool Adventure for iPhone

You're in the grocery store and your toddler starts bawling. What do you do? …

While I don't have kids, I have had a lot of experience with them, and thus know the importance of occupying them from time to time. Still under your watchful guise of course. Unfortunately, you don't always have something on hand, or sometimes you do, but it doesn't really hold any real value for your toddler.

If you constantly find yourself in this situation, there is a piece of "edutainment" in Apple's App Store that iPhone-using parents might want to take a look at. Preschool Adventure from 3DAL, LLC is a $0.99 application that should provide your toddler a good deal of entertainment, saving you from a tantrum-induced splitting headache.

The application features four different activities: Colors, Shapes, Body, and Sounds, each of which feature a whimsical graphical style with bright colors and a "narration" provided by what sounds like an eight-year-old girl. The Colors activity urges the user to interact with some colorful paint splats in standard colors. When a paint blob is activated by a touch, it turns into a sea animal. The color and the name of the animal are then stated aloud. When the blue blob is touched, a whale shows up, squirts water out of his blow hole, and the voice says "blue whale." The animal does not turn back into the paint blob, but it is touchable with the same result. There are seven colors in all, along with amusement for you while listening to your child try to say "pink sea anemone."

The Shapes portion features some differently-colored creatures who live in the cratered surface of some far off planet. Each creature is one of five different shapes, and when they are touched, they fly out of their peaceful crater with a whimsical sound effect. The now-familiar voice says "orange rectangle" (or whatever), and the creatures drop back into their original homes.

The body portion of the app features a dismembered monkey whose body hangs from a banana tree by the tail, surrounded by its floating body parts. When a body part is touched, it floats to the appropriate part of the monkey with a sound effect and the name of the body part. There are eight pieces of the monkey that need to be reattached before the monkey becomes animated and gives you the classic monkey sound. Hopefully, this won't teach your toddler to tear apart animals thinking that they can easily be put back together again, but if it does, Ars Technica is not responsible for the injury or death of any monkeys, chimps, or any other primates.

It's only disturbing if you think about it.

The final section of the software is Sounds. Here, you are presented with a farm yard with six cute little animals. Upon being touched, they sound their animal sound and the girl identifies the animal. There are even two little Easter eggs hidden among the farm animals that sport more sound effects. This is probably my favorite, all though I am also a fan of the Colors portion and I'm not exactly of the intended age range.

The game is cute and your kid should enjoy it for at least a few minutes. If I have any complaints, its the poorly-rendered text and perhaps the fact that the sea animals don't turn back into the colors they started out as, but your kids won't care. While I did review this app using an iPod touch and headphones, I have no reason to believe the sound effects won't work through the iPhone's speaker.

Name: PreSchool Adventure (iTunes Link)
Publisher: 3DAL, LLC
Price: $0.99

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