Beck and Bo

Review & Appy Chat

Developer: Beck & Bo

Description:

Beck and Bo is an innovative combination of free play and puzzle and provides 12 stimulating environments for little children to explore and interact with.
The game helps kids learn new words, practice reasoning, enhance their spatial recognition, practice cause/effect and develop their fine motor skills.

Specifications:

• Category: Game 
  
• Updated: 25 November 2012
• Version: 1.1
• Size: 29.6 MB
• Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later.

Review:

Beck and Bo is a great entertaining game perfect for toddlers and preschoolers. Journeying along with Beck and Bo on different adventures is fun, yet simple to do. All that is needed is dragging items onto the screen to build the scene. So this app is great at using one’s creativity and logic skills while learning new vocabulary at the same time! Beck and Bo have a dozen scenes that basically come to life as the learner puts the items where he/she chooses to. Scenes include a train trip with their dog and even a gorilla safari! The app also provides positive reinforcement after the learner places the objects in a scene correctly. The animations and sound effects also help Beck and Bo be a highly recommended app for learners in the 2-6 age range.

You Tube:

Appy Chat:

A few words about the developers

My name is Dionisis Voulgaris and I’m from Greece. I’ve studied mechanical engineering and I also hold a master’s degree in Computer Studies. About a year ago my sister Elpida Voulgari, her husband Vagelis Katsantonis and I decided to join forces and develop Beck and Bo, our first mobile app. Elpida and Vagelis have both studied architecture and are also the founders of react-in(http://www.react-in.com ), an interactive design agency specializing in the design and development of interactive multimedia technologies.

When did you decide to develop this app?

We have been discussing about developing a mobile app for quite some time. We were particularly interested in kids’ apps. The idea of Beck and Bo was conceived about a year ago.

How long did it take you to develop this app?

We started the development of Beck and Bo on January 2012. It took us 8 months of hard work, including development, debugging and testing before the app was finally complete.

When did you first release this app?

The game was first released on the 16^th of September 2012 for iPhone and iPad. On the 9^th of October Beck and Bo was also released for android devices in the Amazon Store.

How was Beck and Bo inspired?

We designed Beck and Bo trying to think as children do. Children enjoy learning through exploring and experimenting. They constantly want to try things out, discover associations and solve problems through trial and error. When they develop their first vocabulary they love to name things they recognize and experiment with their properties. Finally children need to be praised and rewarded for their accomplishments. Keeping all these things in mind our focus was to create a game that would be fun and engaging and at the same time educational.

What is the game’s main concept?

The main concept behind our game is to provide a fun, interactive and stimulating environment where children will be able to identify objects and use both their imagination and reasoning to figure out where these objects should be placed in order to make sense. In Beck and Bo almost all objects are interactive. When an object is touched you can hear its name. When placed correctly, it animates and you can hear its distinctive sound. When all objects in a scene have been properly placed, the price is an animated star and an interactive book containing object from this scene coupled with their name and sound. In the full version there are twelve interactive scenes full of objects, animals, plants sounds and so many things kids can play with, creating unique animated stories.

What skills were you hoping to help the kids to develop?

Since Beck and Bo is an application targeted for little children, our focus was to stimulate skills children develop in their young age:

• Learn and assimilate new words
• Practice creative thinking and reasoning
• Develop their fine motor skills and reflexes
• Exercise their imagination with pretend play
• Identify objects and animals and associate them with their distinctive sounds
• Discover associations between objects and practice cause/effect
• Enhance their spatial recognition and observation skills

What age range would this app most suit?

We believe that Beck and Bo is best suited for toddlers and preschoolers (ages 2 to 6), but older children may also find our app both engaging and fun.

Are any new updates coming soon?

We have recently released our first update (version 1.1) where the major addition was the support of Swedish language. We plan to provide support for more languages in our future releases, as well as improvements and tweaks based on the feedback we receive from reviews and user comments.

‘We believe we have a quality app that stands out with its appealing graphics, animations and gameplay.’