App Friday: The Odyssey, LanguageBuilder, Smart Kids, and Space Zapper!

Welcome to App Friday, our weekly link exchange of family-friendly apps. Would you like to brush up on The Odyssey? Join us for an App Friday full of knowledge and skill building, as parent developers share content they’ve created for their children. We also have a special-guest-app from the team at Knowledge Adventure & JumpStart – yippee!!!

The Odyssey – Please tell us about your apps: “The Odyssey for iPad” and “The Odyssey for iPhone” are children’s eBook apps, featuring 19 pages, 4 of which are fully animated cartoons. The 15 remaining pages are beautifully illustrated with limited animations.  “Read to Me” function features character narrations & dramatic music.  This eBook provides the tale of an epic struggle of a hero trying to return to his wife and son, after having already been away at war for 10 years. The action-packed story recounts the hero’s adventure on the high seas with monsters, witches, gods and goddesses that tests the skill and resolve of our hero on a simple quest to go home. These are the first apps by Peegos Publishing, founded by parents who were inspired by their daughters’ love for reading & technology.  The mission statement for Peegos Publishing is to raise “Global Awareness through Functional Art”.  Their goal is to adapt world literature, legends & mythology for kids and make them easily accessible on the latest mobile devices.

LanguageBuilder – What is your app about? LanguageBuilder is an interactive applications designed to help children learn how to build creative sentences and express grammatically correct sentences.  There are several settings for parents to customize LanguageBuilder to their child’s needs.  When play begins, an image is displayed and the student is asked to record a sentence about the picture.  A hint button is available to help the student get their sentence started.  At level 1, the hint will contain an almost complete sentence about the picture, with only a few words missing to be filled in by the student.  At level 2, only the first couple of words of a potential sentence are shown and at Level 3, an audio clip is played that encourages the student to use 2-3 specific words in their sentence.  The child then records their sentence in their own voice.  Each sentence can be re-recorded as many times as the student likes.  Once they are happy with their sentence, they can either save and email their recording or move on to the next sentence.

The images that all the sentences are built upon are photographs. Their are ten categories for the photographs, each with a specific themes (playground, water, friends around town, etc). The use of photographs allow parents and educators to not only help their child/students with expressive language, but do it in a way that the child can apply in real life.  The text and audio hints give parents/educators a way to help students use their visual strengths and receptive language to help improve their expressive language.  The ability to record in their own voice has proven to be immensely popular with children of all ages, making them WANT to play. The most common comment I get from SLP’s using LanguageBuilder is that their students love to play.  LanguageBuilder offer a fun and engaging way for children to improve their expressive language and exercise their creativity.

Smart Kids First Grade – What is your app about?  Smart Kids: First Grade is a one-stop-app for a first grader to learn Math, English, Science and Social. The app is designed in a kid-friendly manner, maintained high standards and framed good quality questions in all subjects. True or False pattern to explain the concepts and Explanations are provided for some hard questions. Performance card is provided to keep track of each subject score and helps parents to easily analyze which subjects the kid excels and subjects that have scope to improve.

MATH (Additions,Subtractions.Geometry and Fractions)
ENGLISH (Grammar,Sentence,Spelling,General)
SCIENCE (Life science,Earth Science,Physical Science)
SOCIAL (Geography,Civics,History,General)

More details at website http://www.smartkidsway.com/
Video demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbWNuf0ozZ0

Special Guest: Math Blaster Space Zapper -What is your app about? From the award-winning Math Blaster® brand comes another exciting game that makes learning fun for kids ages 6-12! The intergalactic space station has entered an asteroid belt and the fate of the crew is in your child’s hands! Armed with math skills, kids have the power to blast away the asteroids and ensure that the ship escapes unscathed. With over 20 lessons in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and 3 levels of difficulty, kids challenge their aim, accuracy and math skills in this thrilling, arcade-style game. The game also features 3D graphics, kid friendly controls and instructions and options for tilt and joystick controls.

What’s in it for me this App Friday, April 29th?

• The Odyssey for iPhone – FREE
• The Odyssey for iPad – FREE
• LanguageBuilder for iPhone – FREE*
• LanguageBuilder for iPad – FREE*
• Smart Kids First Grade – FREE
• Math Blaster Space Zapper – $.99 (from $1.99)
• Moms With Apps Mobile App Catalog – Version 1.4 – FREE

*I’ve been getting mixed feedback about seeing LanguageBuilder come up free in iTunes. There might be a problem with the price change functionality in iTunes. We are checking into it with the developer.

Note: These prices are applicable on Friday April 29th until 8pm US Pacific Time. After the promotion is over, prices revert back to regular pricing on the iTunes App Store unless the developers choose to extend the promotion over the weekend.

App Friday Link Exchange Our goal at Moms With Apps is to spread the word about family-friendly apps. We also like to know about great deals. Do YOU have some app news to share? If so, please participate in our link exchange and post it down below. Include the app name (& details) in the Link Title, your email, and a URL to the app. Thanks for your participation.