Our six year-old has been mad about wildlife for a while now, but as 2013 came to an end, this was segueing neatly into an interest in dinosaurs.

A new iPad app called Dinosaur Fact Files is right up his street, then. Published by Amber Books, it’s an attempt to bring the idea of ‘partworks’ – the magazine-style collections that you build up issue-by-issue – into the tablet era.

What that means is a series of non-fiction issues released for the iPad, starting with one based in Iguanadon and other Giant Plant-Eaters. It’ll be followed by a second issue starring T-Rex and Large Cretaceous Predators, a third with Stegosaurus and other Spiked Dinosaurs, and so on. All the prehistoric gang, in other words.

Each issue will feature between 10 and 15 dinosaurs, with a mixture of text, pictures and quizzes to help your children learn all about them. Issue one is free, with future ones costing £2.99 each via in-app purchase, or £4.99 a month with a subscription.

“From the meaning and pronunciation of dinosaur names to the stories of their fossil discoveries and how palaeontologists reconstructed the animals, from tiny dinosaurs to giant dinosaurs, from swimming dinosaurs to flying dinosaurs, from meat-eaters to fish-eaters to plant-eaters, from how dinosaurs hunted prey to how they digested food, and from the early Cambrian to the late Pleistocene, Dinosaur Fact Files explores a huge span of life on Earth millions of years ago.”

It looks neatly designed with bitesize, accessible text. In fact, it looks like the sort of app that will teach us parents a thing or two, especially if we need to keep up with a know-it-all child!

Dinosaur Fact Files is a free download for iPad from Apple’s App Store.

Buy Apps Playground’s 100 Best iPad Apps of 2013 e-book – £1.99 from Apple’s iBooks Store