There are loads of maths apps for kids available for iPhone and iPad nowadays. How many? If only there were an educational discipline to help with these kinds of counting tasks. Oh, wait…

Yes, maths. Zorbit’s Math Adventure from developer Best Boy Entertainment is the latest app hoping to get children engaged with maths: in this case, pre-schoolers, although levels for slightly older children are promised for 2014.

The game sees children helping a pair of aliens – Zorbit and Zippy – build a rocket and fly off to visit Planet Earth, with a collection of six mathematical adventures (i.e. mini-games) taking them through the story.

That includes waking Zorbit up, getting bubblegum out of his gumball machine, feeding fruit to his pet, counting spaceships in the sky, repairing some broken-down rockets and then building Zorbit’s spacecraft ready for blast-off.

Best Boy says it’ll help pre-school kids learn the numbers 1 to 20, start working with concepts like more and less, and put numbers in order, as well as matching shapes and identifying colours, among other tasks.

It’s based mainly on US Common Core education standards, but the App Store listing suggests that curriculum content from countries including the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is also factored in.

Oh, and the pet – Oswald – burps and poos. This may well be the killer feature in this app for most pre-schoolers that we know… Zorbit’s Math Adventure costs £5.49 for iPhone and iPad on Apple’s App Store. Here’s a video trailer for the game: