Ricardo's Alphabet Game Board

Ricardo's Alphabet app aims to teach young children aged 4-6 the sounds and letters of the English Alphabet in a playful way. It is available for purchase online for a small download fee. It presents three well-designed educational games aiming to help children recognise letter shapes, recall letter names and sounds and remember the letter-sound associations of the English Alphabet. Children are presented with a dashboard with the three games and are free to select and start any of the games they want to.

The game I Hear asks children to help Ricardo jump across the river rocks. To do so, they hear the sound of a letter and move Ricardo to the rock that showcases the respective letter shape.  They have to select the right letter shape from a number of other shapes in three different occasions for Ricardo to cross the river. This repetition helps children learn better and recall letters easily. The Vowel Catch game presents a letter shape and asks children to catch the kite that relates to this letter. By touching the letter and the kites, children hear the sound of the letter and/or words. Yet it is noted that matching in this activity is not as straightforward as expected, as it incorporates a degree of fine motor dexterity, for children to match the string of the kite to the letter and not just drag and drop the kite near the letter.

The Hidden Letters game is a hide and seek activity; children are asked to identify a series of letters that are hidden in a scenery.  Some of the letters are partially hidden behind other items such as the grass and a baby goat while others are entirely hidden behind e.g. the door of a house. This activity might need time to digest for young children as a lot of letters are presented to them at the same time while they may not be able to identify where letters are hidden, especially the ones that are overly hidden behind items. A question mark gives a hint as to where to look, yet it is up to the children whether they will press the question mark and get some help or ask a supervising adult for assistance, so that they can be encouraged to persevere with a new or difficult  task before choosing to opt out of the activity before completing it. All games have three different levels of difficulty by introducing new letters, upper and lowercase, and beginning sounds of words.  This is particularly useful as it helps children progress with the learning of the alphabet and accommodate children with diverse learning needs - being experts or novices in learning the alphabet.

What is particularly useful is the reward system behind each activity. There are indicators on the screen showing children's progress throughout the game. This would be further enhanced if it was more visible and prominent on the screen and accompanied with sound e.g., two more activities to go. Also, in each activity there are a number of stars indicating how many sections children have to pass to complete the activity. Again, it would be more helpful if this system was better integrated into the design so it draws the attention of the children and motivates them to complete the activity. Overall, the app is well-designed and appropriate for young children. Yet, it could better support learning if the instructions were more intuitive rather than written text and oral instructions.  However in this current format, the instructions are automatically spoken on the first play of each game, the audio can be re-played upon the press of a button at any time during the game or read aloud by a supervising adult at any time also.

You can download Ricardo's Alphabet Game Board on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.