Weather by Tinybop
© 2016 Tinybop, Inc.
Turn your iPad into a living weather system, where you can explore a working model of a weather system, specifically the sun, our 62 mile thick atmosphere, or water. The concept is good, but there are some shortcomings in the interactive design to note. You can freely toggle between three scenes: sun, air, and water. You can move the sun around to experiment with uneven heating, and see what happens to a dog at home when the temperature changes. There are three types of clouds (stratus, cumulus and cirrus), you can swipe or tap to create clouds or to make a storm. Testers noted that they didn't care for the multistep profile setup (they wished there was a way to just play), and they wanted to zoom in/out or rotate the earth. In addition, the controls could be more intuitive. You can see how extreme weather effects the environment; create hurricanes and tornados; combine droplets or ice crystals to create rain and snow; draw clouds and see how they change at different altitudes; change the temperature and see how hot and cold affect precipitation, plants, and pets. The app contains vocabulary in 40+ languages with interactive labels. Weather is No. 6 in Tinybop’s Explorer’s Library series, designed to let children take a "deep dive" into big ideas.
$2.99, iPad, iPhone
Teaches: science, weather, meteorology, tornado, hurricane
CTR Rating: 82%