MarcoPolo Weather

$1.99, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch (iOS 5.0 or later)

Teaches: science, weather

CTR Rating: 82%

CTR Review

Part two of the MarcoPolo Discovery series, this app turns your iPad into a playful, fictionalized weather machine, by offering an open-ended sandbox experience along with controls for night/day, temperature, wind and weather. You start with a sunny, summer forest scene, and three silly animal characters, plus different outfits and food items that you can drag and drop into the scene. There's a wide range in the temperature (from from -4 to 104 F) and you can toggle between units of Fahrenheit and Celsius. If you enter your birth date, you unlock more extreme (and more fun) weather conditions for $1.99, but we found plenty to do in the free app. There are some clever menu items that appear only if the conditions are right. A kite appears when it gets windy, and you can a flashlight at night to spot the owl. You learn that flowers won't bloom in the cold, and you can only throw snowballs when the temperature setting is below zero. While some of this content seems accurate, other content is not very realistic -- you can't feed a bird an apple and the skunk has a gas problem. There is no scary content and just about everything on the screen responds to your touch.