Tiny Robot Maker

Tiny Robot Maker  by Australian developers, Tiny Twiga Studios, is a simple app packed with a lot of creative fun. Children choose from different options to create robots, and then can use these robots to create printable colour-ins, cards and invitations.  The app is aimed at a young audience, but older children can have fun with their younger siblings, as my children did, and the app might also be suitable for older children with special needs.

My First App – Vol. 3 Airport

Today I’m reviewing the third in appp media’s My first App series looks.  While Volume 1 looked at Vehicles and Volume 2 took us to the circus, with this latest volume we get to visit the airport.  If you hare familiar with the other apps in this series, you’ll already know you are in for a treat.  

Activities

There are four activities in the app and they are identical to the activities in the other 2 My First App apps.  (That sounds funny.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

 

• Puzzle– 8 pictures of airport vehicles. You can alter the difficulty level for the child so they may solve the puzzle with 2, 4, 6 or 9 puzzle pieces. An extra element of difficulty can be added with the rotation option where children may need to rotate a piece to the correct orientation. This is off by default. You can have children of different ages and abilities solving the same puzzles at their own level.

Shape the Village by Wisekids

Shape the Village is a delightful world created by WiseKids where children can explore shapes in amusing and entertaining ways.  The village is a little “unpopulated” when you first enter the app, but as each activity is completed more items are added until the village is complete. The completed village with 16 activities fills two screens of your iPad, and children can swipe up or down to move between these areas. 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Features

Activities – There are 16 activities, each with several different variations so that your child can return to the same activity multiple times with difference in shapes and/or characters each time. I don’t have the time (or patience) to mention all the activities, but here are just a few:

• Rocket ship – the rocket’s window (a different shape each time) is dirty. Clean it to find an astronaut made of the same shape.
• Caterpillar – tap and hold dots on a leaf to guide a caterpillar as he eats a shape path through a leaf.
• Bakery – colour in each shape with a different spread, e.g. spread jam on the square toast, frosting on the triangle cake, or chocolate icing on the biscuits (or cookie for my friends in the USA and Canada.)
• Orchard – pick the fruit on the trees and load it on to the truck.  There are outlines indicating the shape of the fruit required, for example a row of squares for the square apples.  A couple of red herrings (in the form of a square bird and a piece of fruit with a bite) out of it will bounce off the truck if you try to load them.
• Farm – drag the tractor along the shaped path to till the soil, plant the seeds and then water. Once the shape has been traced three times, flowers grow.

You can see some of these activities, plus the introduction to the app, in this YouTube trailer from WiseKids.