This one is more game than education. I’m the first to admit it. But since I’m addicted to it, the little one has shown an interest in it too.
The game is simple – airplanes and helicopters of various colors need to land on their similarly colored runway/helipad. They cannot crash. They travel at different speeds. On some levels, the wind changes and runways change. On others, the runways rotate (on an aircraft carrier) or there are planes that need to land medical supplies and cannot be diverted – you must plan around their paths. That’s basically it. Just land as many planes as you can.
I can see some benefits in learning to create order from chaos (organizing the flight paths such that they don’t collide – and you can really do this any which way you like), manage multiple needs as once (the different speeds and angles and destinations all need to be juggled appropriately – with re-routing as a possibility), and finding ways to cope with stress (when there are 15 planes on the screen, it can get a little tense, but one must still perform). But overall, it’s just a simple line drawing game that is able to add complexity through scale, instead of adding complexity through complexity. Now, that is a lesson in itself, but more a meta-game design lesson that’s more appropriate for when he is in his teens and developing his own software.
Until then, it’s mostly entertainment to mess around as a diversion from the more intense learning applications out there.
Multiplayer options too – across iPhones/iPads, or by sharing an iPad. Cooperative multiplayer is a way that my son and I enjoy the game together and lets him get to play with more types of planes.
Cost: $.99 – iPhone/iPod
Cost: $4.99 – iPad
