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We had an atrocious review today on a site called AppStruck by a reviewer who clearly didn’t get the point. Atrocious in terms of it’s sentiment and in terms of its quality. You can read it here if you like, it’s pretty interesting really (but not in a good way).

Tortured Caterpillar.. or not. You be the Judge.

I suppose if you don’t know anything about child development and you don’t have an 18 month old child to hand, then some of the subtleties of this app are going to be lost on you. But that’s no excuse for actively bending the truth. For example: for those of you who know the game, you’ll know that when you touch the caterpillar, it giggles. For some reason the reviewer here interpreted the giggle as the following:

“any time you touch him, the poor caterpillar develops an expression of utmost pain or annoyance or both, eyes squinted shut, teeth braced, his body writhing beneath your finger.”

I’d say that was a tad dramatic, she didn’t provide a clip to back this up, so allow me and you can Judge for yourself:

And it looks even better on an iPhone, the video doesn’t capture the laughing movement quite right. Here’s what she had to say about the caterpillar when it moves:

“A bleating bird chirp is heard, as well – apparently mean[t] to be the winching sound of his body moving in that undulating caterpillar movement -, when you drag him around screen in some bizarre, torture display. It’s quite the turn-off.”

Hehe. A glittering career in horror fiction does await the reviewer! We’ve posted a full video of the app below so you can be your own Judge. Or you can of course download it and Judge yourself here: (iTunes link: http://appsfire.com/bq). Anyway, this is my (slightly paraphrased) response to the article in the event that they decide not to post it on their site:

Wow. That’s one bad review! Firstly EYFS is not to do with literacy, here’s their homepage rather than the news article you pointed to. EYFS covers all areas of child development from birth to 60 months.

As far as you finding the game “creepy” you’re entitled to your opinion, but when you start to say “glaring” when you mean “looking” I can’t help feeling that you’re being deliberately and excessively negative. The caterpillar is clearly giggling (rather than in “utmost pain”) and this has been mentioned, unprompted by several children. Taking a screen shot mid laugh to try to prove your point is taking things rather to far I feel. Especially as it’s fairly easy for anyone to download the game and check.

When looking at the educational aspects, please keep in mind that this application is for very young children (starting at around 18 months).

The kinds of things it addresses are things that we as adults take for granted, but nonetheless still need to be developed in young children. Educationally we’re talking about children that only have simple language skills and before they are able to count to 10. At this stage, even having the dexterity needed to touch the right portion of the screen is something that needs to be learned. When children are about 18months, they can’t ‘tap’ the screen, they tend to rub it. If you’d had access to an 18 month year old, you might have noticed that. This is why the bell scene works if you rub the bell rather than requiring you to ‘touch’ it in the conventional way, this is to prevent a small child getting frustrated or not understanding and giving up.

The Robot scene that you find boring gets children used to the idea of tall and short and simply provides some familiarity with number symbols which are in the background while they’re having fun. That’s in the EYFS site linked to above: Development 22-36 months > Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy > Shape, Space and Measures > “understanding variations in size”

Another example, the frog scene is related to emotional development. Again from the EYFS site: Development 16-22 months > Personal social and emotional development > Making relationships > “Responds to others’ pleasure and distress; shows empathy” Your description of this part of the app is not quite correct, the emotion of the frog changes each time you touch it, from happy to sad to angry to shy. Most children are able to recognise the emotions of the frog, with the shy emotion being the most difficult, but then even recognising their own emotions is something that children need to learn. These aims are particularly helped by playing the game with the children and as we recommend in the app description by saying things like: “Oh! its sad, I wonder what made it sad” “Now its feeling happy” “How do you feel?”

A number of the features you mention are design decisions made as a result of focusing the game on children. There is no ‘home’ icon to take you back to the main menu as a picture of a small house means nothing to someone who has never had experience of a browser like internet explorer. The sleeping bird you describe is used as a way for the children to navigate through the application and if you think that the animation looks “90s”, that is a peculiarly adult perspective to bring to a kids game review.

The children do indeed have to work out that they need to touch the bird to move back to the menu but then in the same article you say “FunBoard does nothing to incite investigation and exploration”.

Again, we have used no arrows to indicate to the child what they should do next (although that would have been easier). Instead, as a prompt, if after a short time there has been no activity, the items that can be pressed, wiggle and the “rattle” sound you mention is heard. This rarely happens anyway: When an adult encounters FunBoard for the first time, they look at it and wonder what to do next. When a child encounters it, they just press everything on the screen. I don’t know why this is, I imagine it’s to do with not being afraid of doing the wrong thing or breaking it. But this is how the app works.

We have also not included any verbal/text based instructions because the children using this game are not expected to know how to read yet and there are no buttons that a child can press accidentally that link to a web site.

Of course as children get older, the educational aspects become less relevant as by now they will have moved on. It still seems to keep a 3 year old fairly well occupied, but not to the same extent as an 18month child.

We now have a higher quality video of the app posted so that you can see what it really looks like. At the end I have deliberately not touched the screen for a few seconds so that the menu prompt activates (the things that you can press jiggle and a sound is played) something that the reviewer took as objectionable for some reason.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.