Plants
© 2014 Tinybop, Inc.
This second app from Tinybop's Little Explorer's Library (see also Human Body, CTR Sept 13) can turn an iPad into a living forest or a desert ecosystem (more biomes are planned, as in-app sales). It's like walking into museum, with a diorama that has time controls, lots of plant facts, and no levels or rules. Like the Human Body, it contains powerful customization features for individual children, and comes in 50 languages. So why not a higher rating? Because for an "explorer" app, there's not much to explore... or at least it feels that way. You can watch each day (which passes in about two minutes), or use a time dial to speed things up to see seasonal changes. Rubbing the clouds may make lightning which could start a forest fire, and touching a magnifying glass lets you see animated demonstrations on how the birds, bees, and wind might help (or hinder) a plant's chances of reproducing. The illustrations are clear, created by French illustrator Marie Caudry http://mariecaudry.free.fr/. For a teacher who wants to illustrate the seasons, this is an excellent app. You can zoom in or out a bit (but not enough) and there's a nice cross section feature that shows an underground view of a forest; and you can direct the path of badger, bird or deer by tracing it's path, which is fairly interesting, at first. But touching an individual plant or animal doesn't let you do much else, and the good stuff -- like the buzzing bees or the acorn seeds -- are delivered only on select plants, served up by way of a popup window that is removed from the context of the biome. There actually is a lot of content in this app, but finding it isn't as fun as in the Human Body. Our testers expected more to explore and control, and more "slippery" time controls (why not go back in time, or jump ahead, decades or centuries at a time?). Features include excellent individual record keeping, and Tinybop's unique adult/child messaging system, which lets you leave a recording anywhere on the screen (hold your finger on the screen for a few seconds, and talk). This makes it possible for you to put your own curriculum inside the app, delivered your way, by your voice. If your child is older (you enter his or her age in the parent menu) they can see the scientific plant labels, and quiz themselves on the individual parts of plants. One primary strength of this app not reflected in this rating is the ability to jump to other biomes on the fly (we looked at only the first two of the series). For $1.99, you get two biomes (temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, and desert) and the tundra and temperate grasslands planned. The app’s price will increase as more biomes arrive.
$1.99, iPad, iPhone (120 MB)
Teaches: science, biology, biomes, desert, jungle, forest, ecology, seasons, seasonal change
CTR Rating: 82.5%