Lola’s Fruit Shop Sudoku App

Lola’s Fruit Shop Sudoku App
From BeiZ Ltd

About the app

Lola's Fruit Shop Sudoku is the easiest sudoku game in the world! Now kids can enjoy the fun and challenge of Sudoku in a form especially designed for them. Your 4-year-old can play this fruit and number game and have fun. But still it is challenging enough even for 9-year-old children. How is that possible?

The player is invited to help Lola Panda to sort out the fruit. After a few successes, the player gets a well-earned award and at the end of the game the Fruit Shop is ready to open. Like most Lola Panda games, Fruit Shop Sudoku has very clear instructions and pleasant voice guidance.

Lola’s Fruit Shop Sudoku begins with an easy level for young children: they play a 3x3 fruit game with 3 different kinds of fruit. The level has attractive animated instructions, so children really learn to play the game quickly without even knowing what Sudoku is.
On the other hand, the hard level uses numbers and a bigger 4 x 4 grid, so it provides fun and challenge even for children who are a bit older. Naturally, the game proceeds smoothly from each level to the next, so it is never too difficult for the player.

Why not try it? Lola’s Fruit Shop Sudoku provides loads of fun, and it really develops kids’ logical thinking!

The player can choose narration in English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified) and Finnish.

My Thoughts

This app is adorable to teach the concepts of sudoku to children ages 4 to 8.   Personally I find that the app is more geared toward children ages 4 to 6.  

You will have three levels of difficulty within the app.  Your child can start with the easy level to understand the basics of Sudoku by adding the fruit missing in a simple sudoku.    As you go up in the levels of difficulties, you will get either a bigger fruit sudoku or a simple number sudoku.

The goal of the game is to collect fruits for Lola’s stand.   Once a level is completed, more fruits/numbers will be missing from the sudoku.   

The graphics are simply adorable and the challenge is appropriate for the age level.     I think this app is wonderful to introduce the concept of doing a Sudoku for younger children and also to use their thinking abilities for determining which fruit/number goes where.   

I definitively recommend the Lola’s Fruit Shop Sudoku app to entertain and challenge your young ones.   You won’t be disappointed with this app.   It will give them skills that will last for a lifetime!

Lola’s Fruit Shop Sudoku is currently available for the price of 99 cents on iTunes.

Disclaimer: Thanks to BeiZ for sending me the above mentioned product for review purposes. I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way. All opinions expressed here are only my own.

Lola’s Magic Cube

Lola’s Magic Cube
Created by Beiz

About the app

Now Lola Panda is back with an all new and fun children’s education puzzle game. Lola’s monkey friend has accidently used Lola’s magic wand and mixed up the magic cube. Now Lola needs your help to solve the puzzles and put the cube back in the correct order. Use the magic wand to solve each magic cube puzzle and progress on to ever more challenging puzzles.

Designed with younger children in mind, children as young as 3 can enjoy solving the easier puzzles. Older children – up to 7 years old – will find there is enough challenge in the higher levels to entertain them as well. This game is designed to develop children’s visual, mental and concentration skills while having fun.

Our Thoughts

My First reaction when I first saw this app was that I didn’t like the fact that Lola the Panda was dressed as a witch.   Magic doesn’t have to always be represented with a witch I find.   But this is only a personal preference.

This little app is essentially a way for children to solve puzzles.  Kid’s as young as three years old will have a blast to resolve the little puzzle that Lola will bring up for them!    There are three levels of difficulty associated with this app; easy, medium and hard.  

My daughter, who is three years old, has started with the easy level and quickly completed it.   She then proceeded to attack the medium level which contains more squares for her to put together.  What is interesting is that not only you can move the squares but you can twist them to put the at the proper place.   A piece of the puzzle can be at the proper place but not at the proper position (example it is upside-down…).  The challenge of putting the puzzle together get harder as you advance in the app.

The graphic are of high quality and when you complete the puzzle fun animations appears.    You have six faces to complete one level of the cube before advancing to the next level.

I find the creators behind this app have though of a fun way to motivate the kids to do puzzles on the device.  It is challenging and fun at the same time.  

The app is available in various languages;  English Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch. The game uses the default language on your iPhone/iPod/iPad device.  However, you can play the game with any of the available six languages by changing the device language setting (Settings – General – International – “language”).  Personally, I would prefer to have the control of the language via the app.

Lola’s Magic Cube is available on iTunes for the price of 99 cents.   This app is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

GREAT NEWS!

I have received 5 promo codes for this app.

Leave me the reason why you would like this app as well as your mailing address and I will send it to you!  The first five people doing so, will receive a promo code for Lola’s Magic Cube.  US and Canada only.

Disclaimer: I received the app for review purposes. I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way. All opinions expressed here are only my own.

Lola’s Alphabet Train

Lola's Alphabet Train

Created by BeiZ Ltd.  

LOLA IS BACK! Learning the alphabet has never been more fun than in Lola’s Alphabet Train – the most exciting new educational kids’ game of 2010!

Designed for 3-8 year olds, The Alphabet Train is actually four exciting games in one. Your kids start with a “drag and drop” letter game and qualify for the more challenging “form a word” game: as their skills improve, the game gets more challenging, so they’ll keep coming back to master the next stage and learn that reading is great.

The main features are:

• Four exciting alphabet games with Lola the Panda
• Alphabets available in four different languages, upper and lower case letters
• High-quality graphics and fun animations
• Easy-to-use children-friendly game design
• Languages: English, French, Spanish, German

My Thoughts

  I sat down with Dominic, age 6, and Jérémy, age 4, one afternoon to discover what Lola’s Alphabet Train was.    And I must say that I am pleased with what we discovered.  

When entering the program, you have three levels to choose from; easy, medium or hard.   So with Jérémy, we selected the easy level which provided interesting games like identify the letters and composing the name of the object given.   Jérémy had a blast testing this app and looks forward to play more with it.   It is a great app for his age (4-5 years old) because it permits to recognize the letters and associate a word to an image.

When Dominic try the app, we selected the next level and even if the games were similar than the ones on the easy level, they were slightly different.   For example, in the place the letters game, the help was somewhat disable and the child had two letters placed in the word.   The objective is to form the word for the illustration given.   Dominic also had fun playing with this app and with him starting his grade 1 this year, he will develop his spelling ability with it. 

I was wondering how to obtain the different languages since I received this app and I finally figured it out.   Duh!   At the bottom of the screen, you have a little flag with the language written next to it.   Well, if you click on it you will go from one language to another.    Simple isn’t it?  

When I figured this out, I decided to proceed in testing the French section of the game.   It is well done – just as the English section.   However, the only little thing that bugged me was that for the word “BOEUF” the image was a buffalo (which is buffle in French).    Personally, I would prefer to have the proper word for the image (or the proper image for the word depending on how you see it) to avoid confusion in the knowledge of the child.  

Also while testing, I find that the letters asked to be found as well as the associations to be done between images and letters were very repetitive meaning that the same image/word will come out often throughout the game.   I would like to see more words and images to expand the vocabulary of the app and permit the kids to get a variety of options during the game.    If the app stays the same, I suspect that my kids will loose their interest in it as they would see the same things being asked over and over again.

In conclusion, this app is fun to play for younger kids who are just learning their alphabet and their spelling.    However, I would not recommend it to purchase this app for a child of 8 years old unless this child has some learning disabilities.    My oldest son, who was 8 last year, wouldn’t have enjoy this app as it would have been too basic for him.   

This app is available on iTunes for the price of 1.99$ for the iPhone and 2.99$ for the iPad.