Augmented reality (AR) technology – pointing a device’s camera at the real world to see digital stuff overlaid on it – can be a gimmick. But it’s also got potential for education.

We’ve written about a number of augmented reality apps for kids, such as Sesame Street’s Big Bird’s Words, Leo’s EyePaint, Disney’s Ariel’s Musical Surprise and AR Flashcards Space. Now PBS Kids has joined the fun.

The broadcaster has released an iPad game called CyberChase Shape Quest, aiming to find an inventive way to get 6-9 year-olds practising their maths skills.

The app includes three mini-games: Patch the Path, Feed the Critters and Hide and Seek, although only the first of them uses AR technology. Feed the Critters focuses on spatial reasoning as kids flick food to feed five creatures, while Hide and Seek is more about geometry, through finding animals hiding behind a range of shapes.

Patch the Path is the whizzy one though: it involves helping animals return to their home by pointing the iPad’s rear camera at a printed out board-game (either in colour or black and white), and then solving puzzles on each level by picking up, rotating and dropping shapes into the right spots.

It’s a very interesting idea, and one that PBS Kids hopes will get children moving as well as thinking – “you can play while moving your whole body around the game board” as the App Store listing puts it.

CyberChase Shape Quest is a free download for iPad on Apple’s App Store – and that’s fully free, so no in-app purchases are used. The company says the game will also be released for Android tablets (including Amazon’s Kindle Fires) in February, too.

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