Bottom line: Great app to use for children who are cognitively at the toddler or preschool stage of development in order to assess and develop shape and color recognition skills.
Tappie Colorit consists of eight games/puzzles which work on fine motor skills and matching. One game requires the child to match toys based on color; in another the child matches similar toys based on their silhouette. One puzzle requires the child to put all the same colored objects into different pots of paint while another gets them parking vehicles in matching colored garages.
There is a virtual stacking toy that requires the child to follow color cues in order to stack circles on in the correct order and a game that enables them to build objects, like a house or a tree, using different sized shapes. Both my favorite game and the game I liked least use animals – I’ll go into more detail on those below.
I appreciate the use of visual prompting in this app; there are no verbal cues at all so, in that regard, it's a great app for toddlers, children with auditory processing issues or even deaf children. Unfortunately, all of the reinforcement is auditory in the form of a happy tone when anything is done correctly and a cheering sound when the games are completed. Some visual reinforcers for the proper responses should be added.
Tappie Colorit is generally a very intuitive app to use. Both of my kids picked up right away what they had to do. In the butterfly game, the child has to grab flying colored butterflies and match them with the flower of the same color. This game encapsulates everything I like about this app – clear visual prompts, lots of color but not too busy, nothing that would result in sensory overload. The game gets progressively a little harder but not too hard, and it works on fine motor skills.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I was disappointed by the lack of labeling. If a child is putting shapes together to build a train, I want to hear and see the word "train" when the puzzle is complete. The puzzles provide the positive feedback of cheering upon completion but I think you would likely need to add a real-life reinforcer if you were expecting a child to complete more than one of the puzzles in one sitting.
There’s also no way to track data, so I think this app is best used in a one-on-one environment where the parent or teacher can supplement the app with labeling, reinforcing and any necessary tracking.
The only game in the app that I think doesn’t work well is the animal one. In this game the child is presented with three different environments – green (grassy), blue (ocean) and yellow (sand). They choose one animal silhouette at a time to put in that environment and then tap a wooden bar which reveals the entire animal. My children (and I) struggled to work out what to do at first but once we had worked it out the biggest problem was that the animal selected could be matched to more than one environment – the tortoise/turtle could live in all three but the game only allowed you to put them in the sand; the crab could not be put in the ocean only on the sand and vice versa for the seastar (starfish). Oliver and I both found this very frustrating.
In summary, I recommend Tappie Colorit for someone who is looking for an app to use one-on-one with toddlers or preschoolers in order to work on fine motor as well as color and shape recognition skills. If the app incorporated labeling and data tracking it would be a must-have. As it is, it’s still a quality app and only 99 cents.
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iPad ($0.99): U.S. Canada U.K. Australia
This review was written by Didactic Deanne Shoyer who loves using colourful (with a u!) language that requires the use of Google. smartappsforkids.com was paid a priority-review fee to complete this review in an expedited manner.
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