This month young kids can practice speech development while having fun, yes fun, with the excellent Sago Mini First Words. After, they can open up their own farmers’ market and size vegetables with Nico & Nor Farmers Market. Older kids can grab a piece of paper and create amazing animals and objects with How to Make Origami. Plus, stretch your mind with Sokobond, a science-themed puzzler built around creating chemical compounds.
Sago Mini First Words
By Sago Sago Toys
Sago Mini First Words is a fun speech development app for young kids designed in partnership with Otsimo who are well known for their special education apps. First Words uses a modeling technique where videos of children are shown pronouncing letter sounds or words (or demonstrating mouth positions), then kids are invited to say the words themselves. The app uses speech recognition to give feedback, and kids can see themselves on screen, via the camera, as they make the sounds. First Words intersperses practice with fun animations, simple puzzles and games, and uses face tracking to apply fun filters (such as animal masks) so that kids can take silly selfies. As with all Sago Mini apps, the design is beautiful, clean and friendly. First Words is an impressive app that manages to take speech development practice and make it fun. You can try it for free for one week, with a subscription required to continue using the app.
Learn How to Make Origami
By Andreas Bauer
Learn How to Make Origami contains step-by-step guides for how to create 32 different objects out of real paper. The app has a simple and clean design. Choose what you want to make, from animals to flowers to boxes and other shapes, then follow the steps. The steps are included on a single page so you can look ahead or back without having to swipe through multiple screens, and the app contains a guide on what the symbols and techniques mean if you haven’t seen them before. Learn How to Make Origami does exactly what it says and teaches kids to fold paper animals and shapes in the real world.
Nico & Nor Farmers Market
By WGBH Interactive
Nico & Nor Farmers Market is a simple app for young kids involving picking, measuring and delivering vegetables. Kids choose one of four vegetables and the enthusiastic narrator (in Spanish or English) guides kids through picking and preparing them for sale. Preparation comes from measuring the size of the vegetables using an on-screen ruler. Things are measured in units, so the app does not focus on metric or imperial measures. Customers then request vegetables of a certain size, and kids must match what they’ve picked with the customer. That is the extent of content in the app, but it is free of advertising, doesn’t collect data, and is well-designed.
Sokobond
By Draknek Limited
Sokobond is a puzzle game about building chemical compounds. As soon as you start the app you are presented with two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom and must shift the atoms around until you have created water. Sokobond slowly adds barriers, oddly shaped game boards, splitting bonds and other obstacles to increase the challenge. The app is a game first, and while the chemical structures are real, it isn’t a chemistry class and not everything is necessarily scientifically accurate. Sokobond is, however, a fun and challenging puzzle game-based chemistry and worth a try for puzzle fans.
