Billy's Coin Visits the Zoo
© 2015 Spinlight Studio
Beautiful hand-crafted artwork made from fabrics and textures and a strong narrative structure make this storybook an excellent addition to any children's app library. The app uses an innovative navigation, where you guide the coin through the story -- "pushing" the narrative events. We also liked the quality of the narration, the highlighted text, and the ability to toggle between male or female narrators (both of excellent quality). We didn't like the fact that there is no table of contents, so you can't jump to a favorite page, or the inability to skip past the narration. This could make a child feel trapped. In this story, Billy’s mother gave him a coin to spend at the zoo, but when the day came, it slips down the drain. You drive the coin from page to page, first down a drainpipe and into the cages of turtles, an alligator, some monkeys and so on. In the end, the coin makes it back to Billy, who puts it into a toy machine to get a toy. There are 12 possible animal prizes, making it possible for the story to have 12 different endings. Each toy comes with a trivia fact about an animal.
$1.99, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch (iOS 6.0 or later)
Teaches: reading, language, zoo animals
CTR Rating: 88%