Introducing, Syntax City app!

If you have not seen Facebook and other advertisements, Smarty Ears Apps just released their brand new app, Syntax City!  They were generous to provide me with a copy to try and review to share.  Thoughts and opinions are all mine!

This city has 8 locations/skills to work on!

- Gym: Do/Does

- Beach: Third person singular agreement
- Bakery: Was/Were
- Ski Resort: He/ She
- Farm: Past tense verb agreement
- Grocery: Has/Have
- Park: Is/Are
- Zoo: Regular and Irregular Plurals

Let's set up first.  Just like most of the Smarty Ear's apps, you can make student profiles.  You can use up to 5 students at one time!

 You can adjust settings:

 Once you select the students, you can drag their profile/picture/avatar to the place on the map to indicate which skill you want to address.  You can have all students working on same skill, one student working on various skills, or have each student working on different skills at the same time!  How amazing?!

 Some activities allows you to designate a level for difficulty.  Some allows you to do it regardless and some requires students to work towards the higher levels.

Once you decide the activities, students are prompting with a visual/picture/presentation of the skill about to be addressed.  It uses the theme of the place on the map.  Here are just some:

Now it is time to play/practice.  Students are provided with a picture and a cloze sentence.  They are given choices to select to complete the sentence.

If you decided to click under settings, "prompt for voice recording," once the correct answer is selected, students can record themselves expressing the sentence.  This is great for students with weak expressive vocabulary/sentence structure goals.

If you select "remove item" choice for incorrect responses (which I prefer), students are just shown the correct answer to then respond again accurately.

You can play the normal setting or under "quick play" if you only want to work on one skill quickly (great for end of a session quick review).

At any point, you click "done".  Students are rewarded with treasures from each activity.  When you click a student's profile under "reports" you can access treasures or score reports.

An image of a student being rewarded a treasure:

Treasures are rewarded after consecutive correct answers.

Features of this app:
- Targets receptive and expressive skills
- 400 target questions
- 8 different goals
- 8 different locations
- Tracks data for each student
- Share results via email, print, open in…
- Built-in voice recording capabilities
- Results are presented in graph or text format
- Multiplayer capabilities
- Each student can work on same location/goals in different levels
- Designed by a speech pathologist

Things I like:

• Multiplayer up to 5 students!
• Can have different goals addressed at same time
• Ability to collect data and email results
• Actual pictures presented as stimuli
• So many skills addressed!
• Addresses receptive and expressive language
• Easy to use and navigate
• Motivating for students

Things I would like to see in an update:

• Frequent sales, discounts!
• Ability to work on different levels at any time
• Ability to see how many sentences were completed at a time and how many left in session 

This brand new app is on sale for 50% for until 11/5/12!  Grab it while you can!  It can be a pricey app but it is definitely worth grabbing while you can!