Jack and the Beanstalk by Nosy Crow
© 2014 Nosy Crow
Nosy Crow once again gives a royalty-free fairy tale the royal treatment with first rate illustration and child narration, and a full set of well designed activities. In short, download this app... you won't be sorry. Here's a closer look. As with many ebooks, you start with the choice of two confusing options -- "Read and Play" and "Read by Myself" (ironically, both require reading). The second choice provides more of a book-like experience with no narration, plus a choice about the pacing of the text bubbles. The "Read and Play" mode turns on the word highlighting and the outstanding child narration. Weaknesses include excessive prompting (in mode one, about every 7 seconds) and some confusing activities, such as when you are encouraged to climb the beanstalk, but never reach the top. One tester tried for 20 minutes, before giving up. The same thing happens when you are asked to take your cow to market -- you're promoted to speed up or slow down, to no avail... you never get anywhere. These are minor problems, because you can always turn the page to continue. Besides the crisp interactivity, there's some tilt-driven visual effects, plus two levels of zoom. The giant's castle contains nine innovative activities that can be played in any order. You can assemble a broken mirror, comprised of the live video feed from your iPad's camera. Another activity asks you to gently lift up a goose to see if it is hiding the golden egg. If you move too fast, you wake the giant, which starts a chase scene. As with other Nosy Crow stories, potentially offensive or frightening themes have been humorously edited -- no English blood is smelled, and no giants were harmed when the beanstalk is chopped down. There is also a clear, very happy ending involving a hero's dinner. The bottom line? This is another excellent app from Nosy Crow with enough content to keep children coming back, time and time again. Just make sure children know that it is OK to skip ahead. See also Jack and the Beanstalk by Mindshapes for another well designed edition of the story.
$4.99, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
Teaches: reading, classification, spatial relations, memory, music, temporal relations
CTR Rating: 90%