Let’s Bead Friends

Make virtual friendship bracelets on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Grade: B | Age rating: 3+ | Price: $0.99

Let’s Bead Friends allows crafty kids of almost any age to design simple or elaborate friendship bracelets and send them to their loved ones via Facebook or email.

What’s Hot:
Real crafting is messy!  With this app you can have all the creativity without the chaos.  Sometimes that’s exactly what you need as a parent.  Choose from five bead shapes, nine colors, and ten designs every time you add a bead, then finish your opus off with a personalized charm or two.

What’s Not:
This app is fun, but it probably has limited replay value for kids over 8.  It definitely provides creative enjoyment, just probably not hours of creative enjoyment.

The Bottom Line:
A nice, simple outlet for your kids’ creativity.

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We tested version 1.0, which is compatible with the iPhone (OS 3.0 or later) and the 2nd generation iPhone touch. Developer i-itch Inc. Read our disclosure policy.

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MathGirl Number Garden

Don’t look now, but your daughter is doing (and liking) math

Grade: B+ | Age rating: 5+ | Price: $1.99

MathGirl Number Garden is a sneaky educational app masquerading as a fun game tailor made for girls.  They might think they’re earning points to redeem for rainbows, flowers, and bunnies, but really they’re practicing arrays (a visual, right brain math exercise).

What’s Hot:
The garden theme and pastel colors are so darn cute.  Girls will be falling all over themselves to play for points and then redeem them in order to decorate their gardens.  We especially liked “unlocking” the various high ticket items like soccer balls, tire swings, and ponds.  Read more…

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Space Crayons [Free Promo Codes]

A fun kinetic robot drawing app for the iPad

Age rating: 4+ | Price: $1.99

Space Crayons for the iPad allows pint-sized robot lovers to create their own robots with digitally charged crayons and then bring them to life with simple animation.  And you know what’s even better?  Two kids can collaborate on a single design for twice the fun and none of the fighting.

From time to time developers give us free promo codes to share with our readers.  We do this on a first come first served basis.  If these U.S. only codes don’t work, somebody beat you to it. Better luck next time!

If you score a code, please do the developers a favor and leave a review on the iTunes App Store. Not sure how to redeem a promo code? There’s a link for that.

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Draw with Stars!

Create celestial art with twinkling stars on the iPhone and iPad

Grade: B | Age rating: 2+ | Price: $0.99

Draw with Stars is exactly what it sounds like: a mellow, creative drawing app where the medium is stars.  Simply touch a dark part of the night sky, then drag your finger across the screen to add stars.  Touch them again and they become shooting stars and fly away.

Unlike some drawing apps, this one’s multi-touch.  So you can draw with more than one finger at a time.  Pretty!



What’s Hot:
The cricket sounds in the background.  The plinking harp sounds that accompany drawing.  The zen-like experience of goofing around with this open-ended app.

Don’t know how to take a screenshot on the iPhone or iPad?  Not to worry.  Just go to the moon menu and touch “Snapshot”.  Now you can email your masterpiece to a friend. Read more…

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Fruit Ninja

A juicy action game for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Grade: A+ | Age rating: 3+ | Price: $0.99

Fruit Ninja is the best iPhone and iPad game we have discovered in a long, long time.  It’s a lot like Doodle Jump (the most downloaded game in the iTunes store) because it’s fun, easy, and very hard to put down.

Using your finger as a blade, you swipe various pieces of fruit that fly up in the air, chopping them in half.   In classic mode, you also have to avoid the bombs.

It’s very simple, but the best things often are.

What’s Hot:
We love the fabulous fruit-slicing sound effects and the splattering juice—you get all the violence without the gore and questionable ethics!  At the end of every round, you are served a Sensei’s Fruit Fact such as “In some parts of the world, trained monkeys are used to harvest coconuts!”  Sweet.

For a lower stress experience, play in Zen mode.  You won’t lose any lives if you drop fruit or blow up if you accidentally slice a bomb.  For a more competitive experience, compete on the leaderboards. Read more…

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