Go girl! Apps with positive female role models

Media, including children's apps, deliver influential messages to kids. For parents looking for apps filled with positive female role models, here are three very different apps that each convey the message that girls can be powerful, resourceful and creative.

• Kalley's Machine Plus Cats

Rocketwagon, best for ages 3-8, $2.99, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

This exciting, rhyming book app tells the story of four-year-old Kalley trying to figure out a way that her dad doesn't have to leave her each day to go downtown to work. Perceiving that her father works so that the family can have food, Kalley designs an elaborate food-making machine. This charming story plays out over 13 pages filled with interactive close-ups of Kalley's fantastical machine. Readers turn handles, flip levers, control smashers and puffers, design the food's shapes and colors and even heat some foodstuffs with fire. And throughout the pages, adorable cats provide comic relief as they scamper across conveyor belts or leap over spinning gears.

Why this app empowers girls : This story is true. Kalley is a real little girl and her family decided to take her amazing blueprint and turn it into an app. Kalley's machine is riveting to explore, ingenious in its creative engineering and fascinating to use because it has multiple interactive hotspots that interrelate on each page. This app showcases some of the most elegant interactions ever placed inside of a kids' book app. By exploring this app, kids discover a contemporary female role model whose wacky inventor chops would make Rube Goldberg proud. Perhaps Kalley will motivate your child to draw similar machines.

• Little Red Riding Hood by Nosy Crow

Nosy Crow, best for ages 3-8, $4.99, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Rating: 4 stars

The classic fairy tale gets a modern face lift in this interactive book app. Using a choose-your-own-adventure format, where readers come to forks in the path and have to decide which way Little Red heads through the woods to her sick grandma, this adventure can be played through many times for different results. Kids meet a variety of colorful characters in the woods and many invite you to play games with them to earn items that will help Little Red defeat the wolf. With several possible endings, readers will eagerly explore this app repeatedly.

Why this app empowers girls : This Little Red becomes the heroine by cleverly figuring out how to use the items she collects in the woods to thwart the wolf and save her granny. Gone is the weak little girl who must be rescued by a big burly woodcutter. In her place stands an intrepid, resourceful, and ingenious role model.

• Dora and Friends

Nickelodeon, best for ages 4-8, $3.99-$6.99, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Rating: 3.5 stars

Based on the new Nick Jr. TV show Dora and Friends: Into the City!, this app features the aged-up 10 year-old Dora and her new tween friends Kate, Naiya, Emma, Alana and Pablo. Dora asks kids to create stories with her. She offers 10 different background settings; and in each, kids can add themed props, characters and music. Storytellers can also design up to four original characters, using an avatar maker, or they can add Dora and her friends. Players move the characters and props around in the scene as they voice the characters and tell a story. The app records the movement and the voice-overs to create a video story for girls to share.

Why this app empowers girls : By providing them with the digital tools to create their own characters and tell their own tales, this app enables girls to express their creativity through story-telling. The app has a delightful way of presenting surprises. Certain props, when dropped into a scene, actually interact with the characters. Once kids catch on – perhaps because a character kicks the soccer ball – they can have fun trying other props to see what happens. Each backdrop comes with a suggested story-starter to help jumpstart the author's creativity.

J inny 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 .