Hasbro?s PlayDate Digital has launched Play-Doh?s first educational mobile application to help teach children pre-reading skills in a fun way.

The Play-Doh Create ABCs app incorporates the physical activity of Play-Doh in a digitized version that helps stimulate creativity and encourage motor skills and coordination. The app is available for $2.99 in Apple?s App Store and Google Play.

?Our background in children?s entertainment, interest in early childhood education and personal experience with kids in our lives interacting with technology was what sparked the creation of PlayDate Digital,? said Shaan Kandawalla, founder of PlayDate Digital, New York.

?We saw an opportunity to combine brands kids love with exciting new ways of learning via technology to create apps that would teach kids while they play,? she said.

?Hasbro shared our vision, and we?ve partnered together to squish together the tactile fun and familiarity of the Play-Doh brand with a digitized, educational experience that helps children learn to pronounce and properly write the alphabet.?

Play-Doh ABCs
The Play-Doh app is meant to help children gain pre-reading skills through three different interactive play modes.

The first mode lets kids create letters to receive rewards. Every time a child creates a successful letter, he or she gets to craft a reward out of virtual Play-Doh.

The child can then save the reward in the Create and Share Zone. Alternatively, he or she can squish it by swiping the screen.

The second mode allows children to create colorful, animated objects by building their own pictures. Parents can then share the creations using the Send to Camera function.

In the third mode, kids can match Play-Doh letters and pictures of objects that start with the same sound.

Additionally, the Parent Reporting feature lets parents keep track of their children?s progress in the various modes.

To ensure that Play-Doh Creates ABCs provided the best possible educational experience, the app was created under the guidance of Dr. Michael Cohen, a noted preschool education expert and co-founder of PlayDate Digital.

Mobile Play-Doh
The iOS version of Play-Doh Creates ABCs was released at the end of May, but the company just released the app for Android devices.

According to Ms. Kandawalla, Android uses a number of platforms and required more time to create an optimal user experience for the different platforms.

Despite the fact that the majority of apps are being offered for free nowadays, PlayDate Digital decided to charge $2.99 for the app because the company believes that the app offers substantial amounts of value to users.

The curriculum-based learning and high-quality interactive experience, along with animations and special features, enable the charge, per Ms. Kandawalla.

?Mobile is important to PlayDate Digital because it?s important to our audience, preschoolers, kids, parents and teachers,? Ms. Kandawalla said.

?We've seen firsthand how technology has changed the way preschoolers learn and wanted to bring learning to them in a fun interactive way.?
 
Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York