Piano Pals by BigStack Studios is an educational title aimed towards young children with and emphasis on music. Piano Pals is similar to those keyboard apps you see in the App Store except that it is made for children and only includes an 8-key keyboard (Do-Re-Me-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do). Each key is a different color and is labeled depending on what mode the piano is in. For example, in number mode it shows the number of dots on each key. In animal mode, it shows the name of each animal each key represents. This helps children associate specific keys to specific colors, words or objects.

The keyboard itself is very similar looking to those toy keyboards and xylophones you see in the toy stores so it should be very appealing for children especially with the cute animations and themes they have in the game. Piano Pals only includes the farm theme but there are a 4 additional themes you can unlock via In-App purchases.

First thing I did when trying out Piano Pals was give it to my 4 year old to play. He loves playing games on the iPhone so I figured I’d let him try it out first since he is part of the target audience. What was his reaction? Loved it. He thought it was funny tapping on the keys while the farm animals made noises. The piano portion of the Piano Pals is also quite fun for him although since he can’t play any songs, he just kind of bangs on all the keys and thinks its funny. He however wasn’t too interested with the numbers and colors portion as he already knew all that from being in pre-school for almost 2 years already. If he were a bit younger, he might have liked the other 2 modes better.

What’s great about Piano Pals is that it isn’t just a piano for musical notes. You can change between 4 different modes for the keyboard. There is music mode which is the standard piano keyboard sounds, animal mode which plays the sound of each animal on screen, number mode which plays each number shown, and color mode which plays back the colors of each key. These are great inclusions in the game but BigStack Studios could have taken this concept further.

I wish it had some actual lessons included as “games” or little mini games that kids could play with the piano. It would be nice if the app could teach kids some really basic songs by having them follow along with the onscreen prompts or the animals themselves. I’d even like to see some matching games where kids press the keys depending on what pops up on screen. Having these elements might have made all the modes in the app more appealing to my son as there would be an actual reason to play them. This could also broaden the target audience of the app as well. Piano Pals has lots of potential, I think they just need to add more too it.

As is though, it’s a pretty good piano app for little kids.

Piano Pals is available in the App Store for 99 cents with each additional theme priced at 99 cents as well unless you buy them all bundled for $2.99. I do wish however that Piano Pals came with more than 1 theme included for the price.

Rating: B [If BigStack Studios can add some of these suggestion to Piano Pals, the rating would definitely go up. It has lots of potential and I would love to see more of it]