Fido Goes Places DX by Pixel Interactive – Review and Giveaway

Reviewed by Grace

Fido Goes Places DX by Pixel Interactive is a fun and educational seek-and-find game app for young children that promotes thematic learning of the names of 125 common items and other learning skills.

Right from the opening, the app engages your child’s curiosity with 5 exciting places to discover – the beach, carnival, farm, shopping mall and park.  The graphics is bright and colorful and players can immediately feel the mood of each scene with the appropriate music background. The gameplay is easy – your child is given a list of 8 items to search each time (within a time limit of 15 minutes) and he collects them into a treasure box by tapping each item twice.  There are a total of  25 items to find in each location but it may take your child up to 15 games to find all of them as some of the items are repeated in subsequent games.  However, each game is slightly different as the position of the items are changed in a new game.  If your child needs help, he can asks for a maximum of 3 hints in each game but he won’t need them much as most of the items are not too difficult to find (except the ruler!)

While the games are great for sharpening visual observation, they also present frequent opportunities for children to learn and recognize the vocabulary associated with each location. Thematic learning of  new words helps kids to recall them better and the developer went one step further by adding a bonus spelling activity that includes 90 of the words introduced in the 5 scenes.  Your child can learn to spell these words with or without spelling guide.  You can also download some activity worksheets from the developer’s website to extend the learning beyond the iPad.  This app is definitely more than just a seek-and-find game app and there is potential for so much more with the addition of a few options like:-

1) A button to toggle between hiding and displaying the list of items to search.  Challenge your child’s memory by letting him see the random list of items for a few seconds and then hiding it before asking him to recall the items and find them.   Start this memory recall activity with just a few items in the beginning.   Alternatively, you can train your child’s auditory memory by reading a few items from the list and asks him to listen carefully (no visual cues given), hold an image of the items in his mind and find them (in sequence if he is able to).  Exercising all these skills will help your child to learn better in school.

2) Pop out words where children can see and hear the names of the items upon touching them regardless whether the items are to be collected during the game.  This promotes stronger object-word association and the words can be larger.  More words can also be added beyond the 25 in the hidden objects games.  This is also perfect for articulation exercises where the adult can ask the child to find all the objects whose name contain the articulation target e.g. words beginning with the ‘s’ sounds and to imitate the pronunciation.   To add some fun for the young discoverer, introduce a magnifying glass for magnifying objects as it moves all over the screen or a flashlight to be used to find the items in a darkened screen.

Overall, this is a well made seek-and-find game that does more than just providing fun.  It trains young children’s visual observation skills and memory recall abilities while helping them to learn and spell vocabulary words in the context of environments that are familiar to them. Download the free lite version today to check out the app’s quality and discover for yourself its educational value.

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Category: Education
Requirements: Compatible with iPad.Requires iOS 3.2 or later.
Cost: $ 1.99    (24.8MB),   Lite version (Fido Goes Places)   –    (24.8 MB)

Please use our App Store button above if you decide to buy this app. It doesn’t cost any extra and a small portion of the cost goes to support the work we do here at The iMums! Pricing was correct at the time of publishing the review but is subject to change so please confirm before downloading.

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Grace

Grace is a mother of 4 children aged from 6 to 18 years. She checks the daily free apps listing and is most excited to share good app finds. Living in fast-paced education-obsessed Singapore, Grace recharges her energy by watching K drama on the iPad (there are apps for that too!)

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You can email me direct at grace(at)theimums.com