Take your kids on a digital field trip
Apps can be a great way to broaden your kid's perspective on the world. With just the tap of your finger, you can whisk your child away to explore a farm, a city, or even the woods. With the right apps, children learn about each new location by playing inside it, including driving a tractor, sampling food trucks in a city park, and watching a deer cavort in the forest. Here's a closer look at three outstanding digital field trip apps.
Little Farmers -Tractors, Harvesters & Farm Animals for Kids
Fox and Sheep GmbH, best for ages 3-6, $2.99, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)
When little kids arrive in this rural setting, they find two virtual farms to explore. One raises livestock, and the other cultivates crops. Both offer a variety of big, 3D machinery to drive. Kids will control a water truck and tractors with food for the pigs, cows and chickens. For the crops, they will drive large harvesters to collect sunflowers, corn and wheat; and then they will use other tractors to plow and plant seeds.
Why choose this field trip app? While there are lots of farming apps, Little Farmers beats its competition because it is so hands-on and intuitive. Driving the tractors and other machinery uses the simple method of following the player's finger as it slides along on the screen. Lift your finger and the machine stops. The app provides kids with suggestions of what to drive and where to go to complete tasks; but kids can opt to do their own thing. Additionally, completing farming tasks earns you cute stickers. Also charming are the hidden animations kids can find by zooming-in on the farms' inhabitants. "Little Farmers" turns farming chores into digital fun.
Bonus Tip: If your kids enjoy this app, they will likely also relish driving trucks in Little Builders, an app from the same developer but set at a construction site.
Toca Boca AB, best for ages 3-6, $2.99, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
Rating: 4 stars
Kids arrive in a bustling city that is so teeming with life that the buildings actually pulse to the funky music. In this urban playground, kids can shop in a mall, lunch in a park filled with food trucks, or style hair in a salon and hangout in a trendy apartment. Joining in on this urban fun are 28 beloved characters from other Toca Boca apps. Some just appear within the location, but others can be invited into a scene. Each location has items to pick up, eat, try on, carry and more.
Why choose this field trip app? This urban jungle is overflowing with interactive gems. Every scene invites exploration with dozens of hotspots throughout. Kids can turn on lights, try on clothes, buy items, choose a pet, taste foods, change hairstyles, rearrange furniture and more. But the real fun comes from the unexpected. What happens when you tip a bottle of ketchup on top of a character's head? (Answer: their hair turns red). "Toca Life: City" lets kids explore metropolitan life without the fear of breaking rules, getting lost or being jostled by crowds of large adults.
Bonus Tip: This is the second in a series of Toca Life apps, with the first -- Toca Life: Town -- also lots of fun to explore. For other apps about city life, check out my Super City Building Games rec list.
Toca Nature
Toca Boca AB, best for ages 5-12, $2.99, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android
Rating: 4 stars
When you head to the woods in this app, you can forget the bug spray and sunscreen. This app plops you into a nature landscape that you design. With your finger as your styling tool, you paint in trees, raise mountains and cut out lakes. Then you zoom in to see what it looks like close up. What happens if you plant berries, scatter nuts or leave mushrooms? What animals will wander into your little paradise?
Why choose this field trip app? Putting the power of creation into kids' hands is heady stuff. "Toca Nature" makes the designing of nature simple with a small set of intuitive tools. Want to attract deer to your forest? Then select the tree icon with a deer sitting under it from the toolbox. You then plant those trees by running your finger over the screen. Would you rather entice bears? Then select the option to plant pine trees by finding the tool with a bear rubbing up against a tree.
While the creation of nature is fascinating, the exploration of what you have built is exhilarating. By tapping the magnifying glass, creators are now able to walk inside the forests, climb the mountains and swim in lakes they've created. While an app can never replace the majesty of walking in a real forest, this one comes close.
Bonus Tip: For a field trip into your backyard to get up close to insects, check out The Little Bug. And for other great nature apps, click here for my recommended list.
Jinny Gudmundsen is the Editor of www.TechwithKids.com and author of iPad Apps for Kids, a For Dummies book. Contact her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her @JinnyGudmundsen.