Ansel and Clair: Little Green Island teaches children through interactive activities about caring for the environment. With nice quality graphics, sounds and background music this app is a pleasure to play.
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Overview
In this Ansel and Clair app your child becomes the owner of Green Island. They will learn what it takes to become good stewards of the environment while caring for the island and those that surround it.
Features include:
- Hands-on activities teaching concepts
- Multiple user profiles
- Clairvision Deeper Dive
Separate iPhone and iPad versions are available.
Quality
Nice quality graphics, sounds and background music make Little Green Island a pleasure. They provide a cheery learning environment.
Up to four user profiles can be created and managed easily from within the app.
The information section contains additional information, options for controlling sounds and background music, accessibility and protection of social media and external links, ability to delete user profiles and a Player Guide. The Player Guide provides a basic overview of how to use the app.
While Ansel and Clair do provide guidance throughout the app, the user interface is not always intuitive, even for adults. There are also times when the app does not allow enough time to complete the activity before it advances to the next activity.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck testing the separate iPhone version as I could not get it to work on my iPod. Each time it was opened, the app crashed. As of this time, we were not able to resolve the issue with the developer.
Education
Little Green Island is an app with structured play and learning, but yet allows for exploring and free play. Ansel and Clair offer guidance to the user as each environmental problem is encountered. After completing all of the levels, the user can continue to earn green bucks and improve their surroundings.
The Clairvision Deeper Dive provides additional information that supports the activities in the app.
During the activities, children earn green bucks which are then used to purchase trees, landscape accents and environmental savers.
There is a fair amount of reading so children will need to be able to read or have a parent available to assist them. Most instructions are narrated initially, but cannot be touched to hear narration repeated.
Entertainment
The activities and structure of Little Green Island will require the user to stay engaged in the app; they flow from one to another. Ideally, the user would be given the proper time to complete all aspects of the task completely before the app advances to the next; such as being allowed to water the seeds just planted as required in the task.
Catchy little tunes about pollutants make it a fun way to learn what could otherwise be a very dry subject for kids. It presents it in a way that kids will be able to understand and remember.
Value
The app’s current introductory price of $1.99 is a fabulous price for an app such as this; Little Green Island is a nice quality app that makes learning about the environment fun.
Multiple user accounts extend the value of this app making it a reasonable purchase for schools and families, even at full price.
Child Friendliness
The developers have done an excellent job of protecting the users from social media and most external links by placing them in the information section and providing options to make them visible or not, when visible they are then protected.
With all of the terrific protection and options for the social media and external links, I was surprised to receive a ratings popup. The ratings popup does not belong in an area meant for children. It needs to be removed from the play area and should be added in the information section along with all of the other links for parents.
Ansel and Clair: Little Green Island teaches children through interactive activities about caring for the environment. With nice quality graphics, sounds and background music this app is a pleasure to play.