I’ve recently had the opportunity to test out ‘Ansel and Clair’s Adventure in Africa’ App from Cognitive Kid. They state a developer mission that is two fold: To encourage children to think, ask questions, synthesize information and develop higher order learning skills; and to instill a love for learning that will carry on from a child’s early years through his/her adulthood.
Pretty high standard to live up to one would expect. So how does the app go about achieving this? The app is listed as being for kids 4-9, an area that is not targeted as much by the 20,000+ education apps in the Apple App store. In fact I am often asked for apps for this age group once kids have outgrown the more common toddler type number and letter apps.
I didn’t have a 4-9 year old lying around, so instead put the challenge to our Miss 3 1/2, an app veteran of 3 years, and the results were very good. Out of the perhaps 100 interactions she performed with the app over the next hour (yes thats right, a 3 year old sat and played for a solid hour on one task!), she only requested help about 5 times. The space visitors story was a little beyond her, but she really enjoyed the exploration side of things, and the taking pictures of her travels part.
I’d say it definitely encourages thinking skills and a love of learning, but will have to explore a bit further on the synthesising front where I’d expect that kids take what they have found along the way and use it to create some content of their own.
Positives: Open storyline, massive amount of animals and sites to explore, mini-games encourage thinking skills, very interactive, holds kids attention.
Negatives: Much of the dialogue is too long-winded for 3-6 year olds, picture journal could use a further extension task like recording ones own audio descriptions of the pictures taken, needs more assistive features like text overlays for deaf students.
US$4.99
