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Bobby Travis

This is a post by Bobby Travis, who wrote with me at 40Tech from 2009 through 2012. Bobby has since moved on to bigger and better things, but I've left all of his great contributions up on the site. - Evan

Latest posts by Bobby Travis (see all)

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• Google Chrome Explodes On To iOS, Puts Desktop Experience In Your Pocket - June 30, 2012

All but the last are free!

If you have kids from one to four and have an iPhone, you will want to take a look at the games below. They are great for simple play, as well as educational tools to help stimulate your child’s development in everything from numbers, letters, and shapes, to critical thinking, motor skills, reading, and imagination. Your curious child will gain some serious satisfaction from being able to play with mommy or daddy’s toy, either alone or with you, and you will be able to instill in them an early respect for your expensive technology (of which we all find more of in our lives these days). Except the last one, all of the iPhone toddler games in the list are free, and offer hours of educational entertainment for your budding baby!

Hit the jump for some great (mostly free) toddler games for the iPhone!

Shapes

Shapes by Toddler Teasers is a fun way to engage your child in learning basic and advanced shapes, as well as critical thinking and motor skills (hand-eye coordination). The game provides the toddler with several shapes on the screen, a few large ones at first, followed by more and smaller shapes as the child succeeds. It will ask the child to touch a shape on the screen and, if the toddler misses the shape, it will ask him or her to try again. When the child succeeds, he or she is met with either clapping or the cheering of other children. Good times! The best part of this game is the reward system: after a few sets are completed, the child gets to pick from a random “stickers” of animals, bugs, toys, food, and other things (like rocket ships!) and place them on a background of a picnic in a park. The different items accumulate on the background and are identified to the child, providing an additional level of associative learning.

You can get the full suite of games, which includes numbers, letters, shapes and colours for $1.99. The full version also provides more options for backgrounds, rewards, and the like, but the free version has enough content to stimulate your child for quite some time.

Giraffe’s Matching Zoo

Giraffe’s Matching Zoo is a really cool game of match! Your child will be presented with a cartoon giraffe (who doesn’t love a giraffe?) that will call out “Here we go!!” and will move aside to show a screen full of cards that are accompanied by some nice hand-drum style “jungle” music. When the child touches one of the cards, it flips over to show a cartoon animal that makes a little noise that is related to them, like a bird’s call, or a lion’s roar – all the sounds are also cartoony in nature and some are downright silly, which should lead to some laughter. If the child makes a match, he or she is met with the animal noise, some flashing, a chime, and cheerful stars while the chosen cards dance in place. When the board is completed there is much music and flashing and stars and the giraffe reappears to shout “You did it!!”

Even if the child doesn’t make a match without help, he or she will have tons of fun just seeing the different animals and hearing their sounds. It’s a fun game to play with your kids, too, and a blast to watch them start to figure it out for themselves!

First Words At Home

First Words At Home by Learning Touch is utterly awesome! It is one of the best ways I have found to (for free) help your child learn letter association, with a nice slice of hand-eye coordination – and it’s another gateway to learning to read! You can never have too many gateways to reading for a child, if you ask me. Your child will be presented with a picture of a household object, such as a lamp, a bed, a table, a trunk, etc., with the word spelled below it. Below that there will be a jumble of letter tiles (that spell the word above them) that your child can move around one at a time and drag to the matching letter in the spelled word. With the default settings, each letter, when touched, will be announced to the child. Once all letters are in their appropriate places, the game will then go through each letter in the word, in order, spelling it out to the child. Afterward, the object will make some sort of associative noise, like the opening of a door, spin about and take your child to the next word. Not fancy, but it works and is fun! There are many settings that you can play with to increase or decrease difficulty, as well, such as word order, letter order, the longest word, spelling speed, hints, and more.

First Words: At Home runs for $1.99, and there are multiple other First Words games that are great add-ons to it, but this version of the game has proven to be a long lasting entertainment for my daughter, who has just turned two and has been playing the game for months. Highly recommended!

Bonus!

As a bonus, here are three more free iPhone toddler games (in brief) that are a blast for your developing child:

Dial-A-Phone – This game is a very colourful phone pad that allows your child to play with a phone keypad and, instead of calling people you know, he or she will learn numbers instead. There is even a call button that makes a fun digital ring sound. Great for the little, little ones!

Colorful Aquarium Lite – This is a fun virtual aquarium for you or your child that you (and you and your child) can customize to your liking. The aquarium has a few different species of fish that you can feed regularly. You can even tap the glass to get their attention, clean the tank, and tilt the iPhone to scroll to unseen areas of the tank. The lite version is more than enough – my kid loved it!

Chuggington – It is hard to find a game for free that has a child’s show attached to it. Chuggington is the exception. Not too much to the game, but it focuses on hand-eye coordination, getting your child to poke at the trains as they come out of their garages. Each successful poke sounds the trains’ horns. If the child misses, it vibrates. If the child (or you) can keep it going until the clock runs to zero, your kid will be delighted by the snippet of the Chuggington show he or she gets to watch. There are four levels to work through, each faster than the last.

What are your favourite iPhone games for your toddler?