Dr. Panda's Restaurant 2

Dr. Panda's Restaurant 2 is a popular cooking game for kids. Kids serve as Dr. Panda, taking customer's orders and preparing their dishes in the kitchen. Kids work with a variety of foods -- vegetables, fruits, pasta, sauces, spices, and meats -- and tools -- the oven, stove, wok, food processor, grater, and knife -- to create the dishes customers order. 

It's also a great introduction to basic kitchen techniques. It encourages discussion about cooking and nutrition. Kids learn basic recipes such as throwing together a plate of pasta or making a pizza, and they get to try out various techniques such as grating, chopping, baking, boiling and frying.

You can combine flavours and seasonings to make a delicious dish or, if you're feeling cheeky, go out of your way to make it disgusting. If you make it too spicy, your customers will breathe fire, much to the Madhouse Mini-testers' delight ! You need to watch your customers for reactions to see what they think of your food and how you can adapt it to their tastes, so it's a great way of learning about facial expressions with young players, as well as using your memory to remember which ingredients they did and didn't like.

It's a gentle, non-competitive game with no scoring or time limits to worry about. The Madhouse Mini-testers were confused by this to begin with, because there are no levels to work through or targets to attain. There are dozens of different reactions to discover though so they love trying out different combinations of ingredients and kitchen tools to see what they can come up with and keep coming back to the app.

There are absolutely no third party ads or in-game purchases, which is great, but I would like to see some updates with further ingredients  and recipes at some point to keep it fresh.

The orders repeat -- pizza, a stir fry dish, pasta, salad, and soup, but kids get to choose what to put in and how to prepare it and then serve it to their customers who eat it and respond with what they liked and what they didn't -- including some fun expressions, especially with spicy dishes.

Kids are empowered to express themselves freely and fully in kitchen. They can choose which ingredients to include and how to prepare them. Foods change in appearance, realistically reflecting what happens to the food when cooked, chopped, processed, etc., which will transfer to real-world cooking.

You can download Dr. Panda's Restaurant 2 on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Dr. Panda's Restaurant 2 app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.