Annie’s Picking Apples 2 App Review
App Info
Price: $2.99
Overview
Annie, a cute cartoon squirrel, interacts with kids as they help her pick apples, bake delicious desserts, and solve puzzles. As they travel around Annie’s forest and unlock new games and levels, kids also get a chance to meet and play with some of Annie’s forest friends, as well as complete even more challenging tasks. These tasks help them build their counting and puzzle-solving skills. They also give them a chance to learn to manipulate their fingers in new ways to do things such as twist a puzzle piece to make it fit into the correct space. Fun background music entertains kids all along the way.
Features include:
- Multiple levels of play
- Three basic games
- Four different languages
- Bright colors and peppy music
Quality
Kids will find their heads bopping along to the peppy background music as they meet Annie and start helping her pick apples. In addition to Annie, an adorable animated squirrel, they will meet other animated forest creatures and interact within Annie’s cute animated world. Kids can play in the world using their choice of four different languages too – German, English, Spanish, and French.
While the graphics and music are kid-friendly and high-quality, the games themselves lack a little. A white hand demonstrates how to play some of the games and activities, but not all of them. Even when it does appear, kids may not immediately understand what they need to do to play. For example, when completing a puzzle, kids see the hand rocking back and forth to turn a puzzle piece, but in reality they must turn two fingers on the screen in order to twist the piece into place.
Education
As kids play, the counting games they play advance in difficulty. At first, kids must simply tap on a few apples to drop them into the buckets, but the number of apples soon grow. Once a level is mastered, kids move to a new game that has them complete an even more complex counting task. While the tasks themselves are appropriate, the fact that kids must also sort apples adds another layer of difficulty. For some kids, having to sort the apples will not be a problem, but for others it may make the tasks entirely too complicated.
Entertainment
Variety in the games and the levels helps keep kids engaged. After each counting game, kids get a chance to solve a couple puzzle or help Annie bake a delicious pie, before getting back to the next level of apple picking and counting. Throughout the games, kids also get multiple chances to simply tap around Annie’s world and interact with her forest friends.
Value
Some parents may think counting apples may not be worth the accompanying price tag, but those whose kids enjoy working through the verity of levels and playing the various puzzle games may think it’s reasonable.
Child Friendliness
The colors are bright and the music is peppy, making the app appealing to children. However, the lack of instructions for many of the games may end up frustrating children who are trying to play it on their own. Even parents who try to show them what to do may have trouble figuring out how to play some of the games. What parents will be able to figure out, however, is the math problems they must answer in order to gain access to the settings screen. There they can check a child’s progress and learn more about the app.
