Playground 3 - ABC Edition

We thoroughly enjoyed reviewing this app. Jan Essig understands what makes children tick and has the ability to get them learning. The aim of the app is to teach the letters of the alphabet in lower and upper case as well as teaching their sounds and how to read words based on their sounds. This is done via a series of exercises that could almost be viewed as highly entertaining and engaging “games”. The first game of “Flashcards” introduces the letters and their sounds along with beautiful illustrations of animals whose name begins with the letter.  The next game, “Practice” introduces how to write the letters so that users must trace around lightly shaded areas with their index finger. The app recognises whether the tracing is correct or incorrect and awards points accordingly. In another game, we learn how to write the names of animals by unscrambling the letters that make up their names. Once again, this game serves to build on the prior learnings. For every correct spelling that is unscrambled, the user is awarded points. There is also a highly interactive game of “Pairs” in three different formats that could be considered as different levels. This game alone is great at practicing letter and spelling recognition.

Now, here is what differentiates this app from other educational apps in this space: Not only is the learning process very comprehensive with many different engaging exercises that drill home the concepts behind letter learning but, the more exercises that the user does, the more points (apples) that he/she will get. When the user has at least 3 apples, he/she will be able to play an extremely addictive game of a cute looking yeti that shoots apple cores into the distance. The idea is to launch them via a bin that the user has to press and have the apple core travel a long distance. The game is so slick and addictive that you quickly run out of all your apple cores and must continue learning to be able to play again. The incentive to learn is pretty strong!   

As with other apps from this developer, the app has a series of features that offer child-protection. For example the app has no in-app adds and all the external links are protected. The app does not collect any information and nor will it share any data with third-parties. Additionally, the app has its usual feature that allows parents to set how long children can play with the app and whether they want to hide or display the “Yeti-(apple throwing) Game”.

We think that your children will love playing with this app. The quality is fantastic and there are many learning exercises to do and practice with. The number of exercises and quality of the technical features and illustrations is value for money.  The app could also be used  in classrooms of Early Primary/ Kindergarten School years.

You can download Playground 3 - ABC Edition on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.