My Felt World: farm, ocean, safari, arctic App Review
App Info
Price: $0.99
Overview
My Felt World recreates the imaginative props of the old-fashioned felt board in a way that is accessible to any child with a tablet. It includes four scenes to explore, dozens of characters and props, and even a selection of “Fun Facts” about each scene. Players can add sound effects, animate the picture, and add background music as well as capture their creative efforts as screen shots.
Features include:
- 4 unique felt worlds
- 40 felt characters and props
- Scrollable scenes allow for even more creativity
- Fun Facts included for each of the scenes
- Music and sound effects for each scene
Quality
My Felt World is a good quality app that will appeal to kids who like to create pictures and tell stories. Users can choose from ten characters and props for each of four scenes by dragging and dropping them to the desired location. Double-tapping causes each to spin wildly, flip or perform some other animated action. Some of the items built into each scene can also be manipulated, but there’s no clear indication of this. Kids will find out by simply trying to move each one. Each scene also includes a page of “Fun Facts” about the background, such as interesting trivia about farm animals or the ocean. The app is mostly easy to use, but for some reason was difficult to get the screens to scroll sideways as intended. There is only one of each of the felt characters available, which may frustrate some young artists who want to create herds of cattle or flocks of penguins. The “Fun Facts” are a cute addition, but may be above the reading level of most of the children likely to want to play with the app. There are also a few errors, omissions, and grammar glitches in the information, such as identifying a school of fish as a “shoal,” showing a diver in a snorkel saying “I can breathe underwater,” and “Savannas cover a quarter of the worlds land” (The actual figure seems to be about 14% of the world and 65% of Africa, and “world’s” should have an apostrophe.).
Education
My Felt World is a wonderful tool to encourage visual creativity and nurture beginning language skills. Children who play with it will have opportunities to name common animals and objects in familiar scenes, place them where they wish, and tell the story that they create as they bring each scene to life. Many of the items in the background scenes, such as mountains and barns, can be moved from place to place, as well, and double-tapping the felt creatures and props will animate them into flips and spins. The scenes can be animated and have sound effects with the flip of a simple toggle in the menu at the top of each screen, and kids can add background music if they wish. The artwork can be preserved by snapping a quick screen shot using the built-in system. Drawbacks include being limited to only one instance of each felt character and the difficulty of making the scene scroll from left to right to see all of the background and access the “Fun Facts.”
Entertainment
If a child enjoys visual creation, this app will provide hours of constructive play time. Felt boards have been a perennial favorite with young children for generations, and this app digitalizes the experience, making it more accessible on a regular basis to more children. Kids are also likely to be enthused about the capability to easily snap screen shots of their creations, and with help from Mom or Dad, transfer them to printer, email or other means of sharing. The characters are adorable, and there are a wide array included with each scene. Young users are also likely to enjoy turning sound effects, animations and background music on and off as they share their work.
Value
This app is a good value at its $1.99 price tag, especially for families with multiple children or classroom settings. It has enough variety in its four scenes to boost the play value considerably, and developers indicate that more scenes are in the works. Kids are likely to have hours of wholesome fun with this app.
Child Friendliness
This app is very child friendly. The parents’ information section is unprotected, but there are no links included. The only minor concern is that the app accesses the device’s screen shot camera, and there is no way to hide or turn that option off if it is unwanted.
- Parent area (can contain external links or social media)
- NO external links
- NO social media
- NO in-app purchase
- NO 3rd party ads
