• Editor Rating

  • Rated 5 stars
  • Best of the Best
$0.00

  • Quality
    Editor: 100%
  • Education
    Editor: 100%
  • Entertainment
    Editor: 100%
  • Value
    Editor: 100%
  • Child Friendly
    Editor: 80%

Review Summary:

Play and Learn with Wallace is an excellent early learning system that will offer hours of entertainment and education to children from ages three to six.

Play and Learn with Wallace is an excellent early learning system that will offer hours of entertainment and education to children from ages three to six.

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Overview

Play and Learn with Wallace offers engaging practice on foundational skills for preschoolers and young students. The free app allows sampling of several subject areas with limited trials and offers a good taste of the power of the full program.

Features include:

  • Comprehensive coverage of foundational learning
  • Appealing rewards and motivational content
  • Help suggestions available when needed
  • Record-keeping system to monitor children’s progress
  • Free trials of all apps available
  • Customizable profiles for children

Quality

Play and Learn with Wallace offers a wide selection of learning opportunities for young children. The app uses Wallace as an encouraging and friendly mascot to maintain children’s attention. Graphics are clear and appropriate for youngsters, with a nice mix of art and photos of real-world items. The free trials for each app are limited, but will provide you and your child with ample opportunity to make sure the system is right for both of you. The entire app is easy to use, well thought out, and will entertain and educate its target audience for many hours of instructional play. It will be a favorite!

Education

Play and Learn with Wallace covers a balanced array of educational objectives for young learners. The various available apps include opportunities to work on early literacy, numeracy, visual memory, spatial orientations, fine motor skills, and more. Each app includes six or more formats for games that repeat often enough to help young users feel confident in their play but are varied enough to prevent boredom.

The apps contain loosely categorized activities with some overlap. There are currently five available that teach matching, same and different, beginning alphabet, counting, animal sounds, number skills, beginning phonics, and more. App developers are planning at least fourteen apps, according to their About page. There is also an option (available after purchase of two or more apps) that shuffles and intermixes the various activities to provide endless play with little repetition.

Play and Learn with Wallace allows adults to monitor children’s use and progress through the game’s levels, making it useful for group settings as well as for home. The “How Is My Child Doing” section gives a rundown of the total number of games played, which were most successfully used, and accuracy scores for all apps.

There is a Help prompt available for all activities that children can use if they feel stuck on an item. The friendly voice-over offers suggestions such as counting on fingers or using the provided number line to solve simple math problems, or focusing on the target sound in phonics tasks. Some of the prompts are more helpful than others, though. For example, in My First App, the prompt for the matching exercise simply says “When you know which one it is, touch it.” This could be improved by reminding the child to look for colors and patterns to make the match.

Overall, the educational content of this app is excellent and the makers are to be commended. It will add to any parent’s collection of high quality activities for a young child.

Entertainment

This app is very cute and entertaining, and offers a lot of nice features for young children. The background music is enjoyable, not distracting or annoying. The voice over is very clear and easy to understand. Graphics are a nice mix of drawings and realistic pictures, and the developers use color well.

Young children will enjoy having the mascot, Wallace, on nearly every screen and hearing his happy bark when they accomplish a task. I also liked the wide variety of tasks available within each app, which will help hold children’s attention and keep them learning. The types of responses needed for each game are varied, yet simple and intuitive. Good job!

Value

Play and Learn with Wallace is an excellent value. The free trials, though limited, will allow parents or caregivers to make sure each app will meet expectations and engage children. If users decide to purchase, each app is priced at just $1.99. Users can mix and match apps that will best meet their children’s needs. This system also will allow the program to grow with your child. A young user could start out with an early learning app, like My First App, then grow into levels designed for preschoolers and even lower elementary students.

Child Friendliness

The Parent’s Guide section contains links to the publisher’s websites (USA and British versions), but these links are well protected and would be difficult for children to stumble on to by accident. The system opens the web pages within the app, and does not allow access to other parts of the internet. There are no links to social media or email.

The system does have easy access to make in-app purchases of full versions of the individual apps for sale. The “Buy” button is right above the “Try” button, and presents a pop-up confirmation box. If the purchase is confirmed, the user will need to enter the App Store password and have a payment method set up. It would be better if the buttons to purchase the apps were segregated into the parents’ section so that small children could not activate them by accident.

Play and Learn with Wallace is an excellent early learning system that will offer hours of entertainment and education to children from ages three to six.

$0.00
Editor rating
Rated 5 stars