Alien Buddies

Posted by Jennifer

App Name: Alien Buddies

Overall Rating: 5/5

Mom’s Rating: 5/5

Kids’ Rating: 5/5

Recommended Grades/Ages: Toddlers, Preschool, Kindergarten

Skills Developed: Colors, Letter Names, Numbers, Counting, Shapes

Available On/Price: Universal (iPhone/iPod/iPad) $1.99

Reviewed on: iPod and iPad

App Description:

Would your child like to rescue cute aliens, connect the stars, and explore alien landscapes while learning about numbers, colors, shapes, and colors?  Mine sure do, and that’s why Alien Buddies has been a big hit here at our house.

Alien Buddies includes three major activities – Match, Dot-to-Dot, and Stickers.  The matching activity is where the action really takes place!  Your child needs to rescue the aliens – a rescue space pod will arrive and it is your child’s job to put the matching alien in the pod.  If they pick the right one, the pod will whiz away and a new one will arrive.  If they pick the wrong alien, it will be ejected – sproing – and your child can try again!

Visual matching drives the first four activities – children look at the rescue pod, and then look at the aliens for a match.  At any time the pod or aliens can be touched to hear the audio of the color, shape, number, or letter.

Audio-visual matching drives the second set of four activities.  The space pods arrive without an image on them, only a speaker button.  When tapped the pod will tell your child the alien to pick, then your child needs to find the right alien.

The letter activities all include case-based options; there is a rescue mission for lower-case letters, for upper-case letters, and for mixed case letters.  The number activities also have different rescue missions, 1-10, 1-20, and 1-50.

When a rescue mission is successfully completed a check mark will be displayed on it.  These activities are randomly generated, so each play through is a bit different.

Dot-to-Dot includes eight different dot-to-dot outlines with two levels – please HELP and I can do it MYSELF.  If your child needs a bit of help figuring out which order the numbers go in the app will change the color of the next number so your child knows where to tap next (this really helps with those early counting skills.  Some of these figures use the numbers from 1-10 but some use numbers up to 17 at the highest.  If your child can do it himself the numbers are all the same color. Both levels include the announcement of the number name when tapped.

The stickers earned in the matching and dot-to-dot activities can be used on any of eight backgrounds that come with their own background music and animations. The stickers can be pulled out of the sticker drawer and positioned, resized, layered, rotated, and put away. The background can easily be cleared entirely, and a photo of the completed scene can be added to the camera roll.

There is an easy to use Reset All button in the Parents screen that will put the app back to the beginning in terms of stickers earned and activities completed.

What We Liked:

If Alien Buddies sounds a bit like multiple-choice questions to you, then you’re right!  But this is multiple-choice like you and your children have never seen it before!  The audio reinforcement and prompting, fun interactivity, and sound effects are enough to make everyone forget that at its core this is a traditional teaching method.  Alien Buddies really takes advantage of touch screen technology and takes this tested and tried methodology into a fun and engaging, play-based environment.

There are many flexible options and levels built into Alien Buddies that make it a great app choice for a wide range of abilities.  I love that you can easily choose different ranges of numbers to work with, different letter cases, and the option to have the app help your child through the dot-to-dots.

The app is just blazingly cute with an incredible design as well.  The aliens make such cute noises and wiggle around when picked up, squeaking, “Oh no!” when ejected from the space pod if the answer isn’t correct.  My girls have so enjoyed playing with these little guys.  I often hear my three-year-old giggling at the aliens’ responses to her rescue attempts, and my five-year-old spends a lot of time telling little stories to herself with the many stickers she and her sisters have unlocked on the creative backgrounds the app provides.

What We Didn’t Like:

I do have a few suggestions that I’d love to see in this app.  In the visual matching activities I’d like it if the aliens said the color, number, shape, or letter they are wearing when they are first tapped, even if the child doesn’t release their finger (mine often don’t, so they aren’t getting the audio feedback in on these first activities).  That and the addition of a phonics option would make this app unstoppable!

Overall:

Alien Buddies is an incredibly fun way to practice number names, number sequencing, letter names, shapes, and colors.  The top-notch playful design and interactivity encourage lots of repetition and extended giggly practice time while using educationally sound teaching methods.

Buy Alien Buddies, universal (iPhone/iPod/iPad) now for $1.99!

Have you downloaded this app?  Let us know what you and your children thought – leave a comment!