Oh, this is an interesting one: an official Sesame Street app that gets your children running around the house looking for words, with the help of Big Bird himself.

The app is called Big Bird’s Words, and it was released for iPhone last night. It’s an educational augmented-reality app that aims to help children build their vocabulary by looking at the text in the real world around them.

“Big Bird knows something special that he wants to share with your child: Words are all around you! And he’s made a wonderful Word-o-Scope to help you look for them in the real world,” explains its App Store listing.

The emphasis here is on food, with more than 500 words for children to find on products and labels, whether they’re at home or in the supermarket. Eggs, Milk, Carrot and so on. Kids build a word list then go off hunting for its ingredients, pointing the iPhone’s camera at the words to hear Big Bird read them out.

Sesame Street is also producing some free “emailable word labels” for the words that might not be easily accessible in your home. It sounds great fun, and clearly there’s scope to expand the kind of words to other products in the future too.

Big Bird’s Words costs £0.69 for iPhone on Apple’s App Store.

Read about more Sesame Street apps on Apps Playground.