Bottom Line: Cute animal videos and a few good features, but overall not really any better than the multitude of farm animal apps already available.
Adventurous Animals features three games and an interactive home screen. When the app opens, children are presented with eight farm animals, which can each be pressed to move to a page for each animal that shows an image and the name. The name can be spelled letter by letter or as the full word and the animal can be pressed to hear its sound.
Beyond the home screen, there are three games. One is good for young toddlers—listen to the animal name and tap the matching animal. The other two games would work well for children in kindergarten—choose the correct numeral to match the number of flowers shown, and unscramble each animal word by tapping, in order, hot air balloons carrying the letters. The child can earn medals for completed levels, all visible on a medal page.
The Good:
* The graphics in Adventurous Animals, by FestaApp are unique (sort of a claymation-style) and a nice change from the typical app animals.
* There are really fun, quirky cartoon adventures on several of the animal pages. These short video clips are humorous and will be very entertaining for the target age; they involve chicken eggs with feet jumping off a diving board, a flying cow, and other silly adventures by the animals featured in this app.
* All of the flowers in this app are countable. When tapped, they “bloom” and a number appears, with accompanying audio. Each page has a different number of flowers to count.
* The app has no advertisements nor external links to social media. This consideration of the actual app user is very much appreciated by this mom/therapist. Parents can let young children independently explore this app, making it a good choice to download for farm-loving toddlers.
The Not-So-Good
* The games seem incomplete. The animal matching and spelling games would benefit from including the animal sound. The numeral game is going to be difficult for most children under five—it would be helpful if each flower could be counted by tapping, as in the TeachMe series or if the number were spoken when tapped and then tapped again to select. All three games would be improved by giving the child the chance to guess again if their first answer is wrong.
* Although the flowers can be pressed on every screen, the numbers are only accompanied by a ding sound instead of the number being read.
* However humorous, the videos don’t add much educational value to an app that feels limited in that department. Couldn't they include some of the letters, numbers or words? Literacy can be silly too!
* The app has features that are well suited for a variety of ages, from young toddlers to kindergarten. This benefit sometimes makes the app seem disjointed and limited in value for each age. A kindergarten student gains the most educational value, but might find the presentation too young. Most young toddlers aren’t ready to spell and count objects, even if they enjoy the animal sounds and silly videos.
* The title in the app is The Adventurous Gang of Animals and "gang" probably isn't the best choice of word there. There are some things that are just a little strange, like to hear the full animal name the child must press a musical note, but there is no music.
* The graphics, while unique, have no depth, as can be seen in the flower image (above) that has no background.
Overall, Adventurous Animals isn’t a bad app. It’s just not that much different from what is already out there. If it is designed to be an app that entertains a variety of age groups it would benefit from more content, to make it more valuable to each age. If it’s designed with a particular age group in mind, it needs more focus.
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Heather Hetler doesn’t live on a farm, but she does have three kids (10, 8, and 4). She also starts work in August as a speech-language pathologist in a K-4 school. smartappsforkids.com was paid a priority-review fee to complete this review in an expedited manner.
I m at FestaApp website and thanks ever!
Posted by: Order Letters | 07/16/2012 at 06:11 PM