App Review: Kid Book
Kid Book is a simple, well illustrated app with audio to match. It has some promise and some room for enhancements.
When you dive into the app you are shown an animal inside a colored shape. Each time you tap the phone you get a new audio piece (first the animal sound, then the animal name, then the shape and finally the color of the shape…lather rinse repeat). To advance you simply click the left or right arrow at the bottom of the screen, and you get a new set of items.
This app, like many others does most of the basics well but fails to give kids a reason to keep playing. There is certainly a choose-your-adventure argument to be made for letting kids float through an app. Based on my kids use of the apps, however, it is also really important to give kids something to look forward to or they will neither play for long nor return to the app.
Monkey Preschool Lunchbox is just one of several apps that has figured this trick out (review here). After a few rounds of the game, kids get to choose a sticker. Other apps I’ve seen use scoring or unlock features as kids successfully navigate through them, giving kids a sense of accomplishment and motivation to go forward.
Overall, the foundation laid for Kid Book is very strong, and I believe with some rethinking around the purpose of the app, it could be tweaked to become a fan (and maybe even Apple) favorite! Keep your eye on Stolen Lunch for more apps.
Related posts:
- APP REVIEW: Jumbo Book – Bo’s Rainbow The first thing that strikes you about Jumbo Book is the great design. Bo the elephant definitely lives in a world that is easy on the eyes. As you might expect from the title of this app, it’s a children’s book built for the iPhone. It features a cute little elephant, Bo, and follows [...]...
- App Review: Feed Me! One of the newest kids iPhone apps, “Feed Me! Numbers, Colors & Shapes!” is an endless buffet of educational fun. It features fantastic animations of a hungry purple monster who is constantly day dreaming about something — a color, a shape, a number, a pattern – you name it, and this magic little [...]...
- APP Review: Letters A to Z Letters A to Z succeeds because it takes a simple concept and executes it well. My toddler loves it because it is easy to use, visually pleasing, and helps her learn her letters. Playing with the app is straightforward — you can flip through the letters of the alphabet the same [...]...
- App Review: Whizzit 123 Whizzit 123 is a pretty solid app. It is designed to give children ages 2-5 a fun learning environment to tackle numbers and objects. Using audio cues kids are given a task, such as counting spirals. As each item is clicked a starry animation appears, along with a narrator voice counting each item. After being selected, [...]...
- App Review: Catch and Count Catch and Count is an app I downloaded months ago because, truth be told, I saw it in the top free apps for education. Oftentimes I am lured in by cutesy icons but in this case I grabbed one that was popular… This app is a bit quirky and odd. The idea is to catch eggs, [...]...
Share