My daughter was three a few weeks back and as a lovely gift, 965 Studios sent me a couple of codes for two of their Apps.
The Apps are Learn the Animals and Learn Fruit and Vegetables.
965 Studios is an American company and the codes came with an apology for the differences that I was likely to see/hear which is good because it at least forewarned me.
We Brits tend to be quite reserved when it comes to praise, so to hear a voice blasting out of the iPad saying “I’m so proud of you” is a little bit of a shock! However, the little one loves it and has now been known to wander up to me and say “I’m so proud of you mummy”
I love these apps. They are very simple, with a cartoon grid of pictures displayed first.
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There is little my now-3-year-old daughter enjoys more than dressing her toys up and swapping all their clothes. She also enjoys making imaginary cups of tea (I am British remember) and food for us all.
My PlayHome is quite a simple little app. The people as you see them in the picture here are fixed in position like that (you can move them around obviously), but many of the objects that you see around them are interactive. There are 4 rooms: A bathroom, A kitchen, A bedroom and the Lounge/Living room.
Every room has specific objects you can interact with. In the bathroom you can put the people in the shower, and when they get wet you can use a towel to dry them off. There is very little animation involved. For example, you know they are wet because they drip, the towel doesn’t move but as you move it over a dripping character the drips disappear. Objects rotate to adapt to the surface you put them on so if you put a kid on a bed then they lie down. Sound accompanies each action.
At first, I wasn’t impressed. But the more you play with it, the more you start to appreciate the little things, like boiling the kettle, putting milk in the cup and then letting a character drink it. There is a CD player in the lounge with a collection of different CD’s that you can choose to play with different musical styles.
I eventually let the little one have a go too and after showing her the general principles for a few minutes I never got another look in. She quite happily plays with her house and family for ages, totally absorbed.
My criticism would be that there aren’t more things in each room to interact with and maybe you could actually dress and undress the characters (even if it wasn’t as far as letting them get naked!)
Overall though this app fools you into thinking there is not much to it with its simplicity but actually would definitely be a recommendation I would give to parents with kids of a similar age.
Here’s an App Store link for My PlayHome; it’s priced at $2.99.
Disclosure: My PlayHome provided a promo code to the post author for the review of this app. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the "About" page.
Dinosaur Zoo for iPad is pretty much just what the name implies – a zoo full of dinosaurs as an iPad app. And who doesn’t love dinosaurs? I’ve never met a kid who didn’t, and not too many grownups either.
Here’s part of the app’s intro in the App Store:
Time to start your own dinosaur zoo of fully animated dinosaurs. You can throw fish to swooping Pterodactyls, tease the Euoplocephalus, try not to get your fingers bitten by the Monolophosaurus – and if you roar, they roar back.
Each dinosaur comes with information from the latest paleontology discoveries, plenty of fascinating facts, prehistoric maps of where they lived and where they died, and spinning 360-degree clay models overseen by the world’s leading paleontologists.
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I try to keep an open mind when test driving an app for the first time. The 3 main questions going through my mind are – what does the app do? Does it do it well? And, will I use it? I apply these three basic questions to any app, whether it’s being heralded as the Next Big Thing in the app universe or it’s a humbly obscure offering of the mom-and-pop variety fighting for press attention.
And so I approached Qwiki – which is being pegged as Yet Another Innovative Way to Connect with Information on the iPad. [click to continue reading…]
(image source: http://www.ninjamarketing.it)
When I was in high school, we lugged really heavy and expensive textbooks around e.g. Gardner’s Art through the Ages (Amazon link), our backs bearing their combined weight during our commute. Now in 2011, a student’s life is being transformed to adapt to the digital age (at last). As we’ve seen since the advent of the iPad, the first early adopting schools have started paving the way for integrating the devices in classrooms all over the world. Will our children grow up in a world where costly printed textbooks and heavy uberdimensional bookbags are a thing of the past? [click to continue reading…]
