Princess Fairy Tale Maker

Duck Duck Moose may well be our second-favorite app creator (after Toca Boca!). For a long time, Autumn’s favorite app was Duck Duck Moose's Itsy Bitsy Spider. Just lately though, Brooklyn has taken to fiddling with the Duck Duck Moose Princess Fairy Tale Maker. Whenever I hear classical music blasting from the backseat of the van, I know she's creating a new scene. In fact, she told me that the classical music score that accompanies the app is one of her favorite things about it; she finds the music soothing.

There are three options on opening the Princess Fairy Tale Maker: “fairy tales,” “coloring,” or “my drawings.” This is a bit misleading, as the first two are options for you to create--in Fairy Tales, you use stickers or a paint tool to draw on a scene, then have the option to record a voiceover narration. Coloring is a similar scene on which you can use your finger to fill in color, sparkles, or patterns. Any of the resulting scenes or coloring pages end up saved in My Drawings and can then be rearranged in any order to result in a story.

As always, when I purchased the app, I envisioned Brooklyn creating whole stories with it. I thought she would meticulously create each scene to build upon one another and then narrate a brilliantly-held together tale to go with it. And maybe she would if I worked on the bestselling hypothetical stories with her. But we don’t have the time. So I’ve had to adjust my expectations some. Instead of stories she creates individual scenes. Each one is new and creative. Sometimes she tells me stories to go along with the scenes; she has yet to figure out how to record these stories, but that’s okay, since they rarely make a whole lot of sense. A built-in writing prompt or two from Duck Duck Moose might have helped point her in the right direction. But hey--at least she enjoys the soothing music. 

Leo's Pad: Preschool Kids Learning Series

I downloaded the Leo’s Pad app, and the four free “appisodes” that go with it so far, on the advice of SmartAppsforKids.com (an awesome resource, which I subscribe to in my Facebook feed) and then forgot all about it until Brooklyn started talking about the characters as though they were real people. The first time she mentioned  Cinder, I assumed she meant Cinderella. But this Cinder goes with Leo, not Prince Charming. And there’s a Marie, who Brooklyn likes because she goes out of her way to include her friends in things, as well as someone named Gally. It wasn’t until I went to the website to research this post that I realized the characters she was talking about are young Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, and Galileo Galilei.  (Cinder is Leo’s pet dragon.) Figuring that out drove me to the iPad to watch some Leo’s Pad for myself.

Leo’s Pad is a series of animated stories with embedded games that adapt to just the right level of difficulty as you go along. The appisode that I watched/interacted with began with Cinder darting away and hiding from Leo. I was asked to check and see if he was behind the circle, or the door with the number 5 on it, or the blue curtain… clearly a test of my understanding of shapes, numbers, and colors. After that Leo explained that it was Gally’s birthday and so we should make him a present; first I got to draw him a card with stickers and a paint application, then fit the parts of a telescope together like a puzzle while Leo named the parts, using the scientific vocabulary words for them. And the last thing I did before I got interrupted and had to put the iPad down was to choose the right amount of stones to launch Leo into the air with a catapult so that he could fly with mechanical wings next to Cinder off to Gally’s birthday party.

The combination of art, science, and historical content crammed into one short appisode was dizzying (nevermind the review of the preschool content!) My five-year-old has no idea who these people are, and doesn’t particularly care. But basic machines and the relationship between the friends are themes she relates to. And the interaction with the characters in her stories is very cool. This next generation “appisode” that learns about its viewer and adapts as it goes along strikes me as the very thing the iPad was made for. People talk about the big break through that Blues Clues and Dora the Explorer were for preschool television because they talked directly to the kids and waited for an answer. Well, now the kids can talk back, and the characters are actually listening. How cool is that…?!

But wait there’s more… The app also features a Parent’s Pad, on which you can track your child’s progress with different skills. It’s a built-in assessment tool that tells you if a child (or different children) improved or declined with things like color identification. Or letter tracing. And it will tell you which games the children played and appisodes they watched. You can set up separate accounts for a number of different children.

I doubt this app (or at least the individual appisodes) will be free much longer. This must be some type of testing phase. Either that or it’s all a massive hook to make sure we can’t live without Leo and friends. Brooklyn might be there already. I asked her what she liked about Leo’s Pad and she said she likes how Leo does some stuff and then she gets to do some stuff… And she also really likes Cinder, the dragon. We have had the app a few weeks now and there has not been a new appisode in that time; I really hope Kidaptive is planning updates regularly.