Dora’s Cooking Club for Nintendo DS combines cooking techniques and cooking techniques to deliver an educational title that will challenge your toddlers to expand their math skills, and potentially learn a little about healthy cooking in the process.

The game uses a mixture of simple tapping and dragging controls with the stylus to control the different mini-games.  For example, Dora may cook an enchilada recipe with her Abuela, and the first part may call for chopping up the different foods, which the player must do by tapping the screen.  Other parts may involve dragging a certain number of ingredients into a bowl, or putting numbers in ascending or descending order.

The more than 30 different cooking games combine to teach a very deep and broad range of math skills perfect for toddlers and kindergartners, such as numbers, counting, shapes, patterns, sorting, addition, subtraction, measuring and even division.

Some of the math concepts may be a bit advanced for 3 or 4 year olds, but ultimately they may surprise you by being challenged.  We played with a three year old, and he just wasn’t ready yet to deal with numbers above 20, and the game features numbers all the way up to 40.

True to its target audience, Dora’s Cooking Adventure does a great job of providing verbal explanations and on-screen diagrams to let players know what they need to do.  The controls are also somewhat forgiving, and there aren’t harsh penalties for incorrect answers or actions.

We love the educational content in Dora’s Cooking Club, and the great variety of easy to play math-themed cooking games.  But there’s a real question to us as to whether most young kids who are ready for the math concepts are still into Dora.  If your kid is around kindergarten age and is still into the show, then by all means this game is for your family, because we think Dora’s Cooking Club is one of the best educational DS titles we’ve played.