Mini Monet Creative Studio & Art Club for Kids App Review
App Info
Price: Free In-App Purchases
Overview
Mini Monet – Creative Studio and Art Club for Kids is a beautifully designed full featured art app that will appeal to a large range of ages. Parents can control many features from a secure section just for parents. Children can share drawings and participate in challenges.
Features include:
- Fun, easy to use interface
- Full featured drawing options
- Extensive parent controls
- Rewards for drawing and sharing
- Art Club community for sharing drawings
Quality
The interface in this charmingly designed app is not only easy to use, but immediately sets the right tone and encourages creativity. The music, colors and graphics come together nicely.
A help button is available to guide the user through the features or tools applicable to the current page. Young children are able to use this help feature without adult supervision as no reading is required.
The app contains many of the standard drawing tools and colors, such as an eraser, a limited undo feature, stickers and stamps. Changing the undo feature to unlimited would be a nice update.
Education
Mini Monet allows children to color and draw freeform, this is not an app with a step-by-step drawing tutorial. Children can choose from multiple options for drawing and coloring, each offering something a little different than the others. In the Symmetry area for example, children can choose a drawing from three categories; categories are based on difficulty. Half of the drawing is blank and the other half contains half of the picture, lines only. The child can complete the entire drawing as desired. The Draw area offers three categories of backgrounds from which the child can begin their drawing. In the Challenges area, children can choose the current challenge and see previous ones. Challenges can range from drawing your favorite animal in the zoo, what you see on the horizon to drawing some ants and giving them food.
All creations can be saved locally to the Art Book or device’s photo directory or shared in the Art Club where other Mini Monet users can view and “like” them. Drawings can also be emailed.
Entertainment
Children who love to draw and color will return to this app over and over again. It offers endless possibilities and is a pleasure to use. Younger users will enjoy being able to color or draw without restrictions and the older users will appreciate the features that allow them to add a variety of creative details.
Value
This app has so much to offer for a wide range of users making it a great value for families and schools. Mini Monet will likely become one of those apps that you do not delete from your iPad.
Child Friendliness
Mini Monet contains a secure section for parents that allows parents to control many of the features in the app, features such as audio and drawing tools, notifications, challenges and sharing. Some features require an account to be created and an internet connection.
A few areas of concern are how easily drawings can be shared in the Art Club and some of the requirements for earning coins. Ideally, some sort of adult interaction would be required prior to children saving their drawings to the Art Club and prior to children accessing the Art Club, even for viewing and liking others drawings.
Coins are earned for a number of things which can be a good incentive for some kids, but is unnecessary in an app such as this. Opening the app daily, actively drawing for 15 minutes, submitting a drawing to the Art Club and liking another artist’s drawing will earn the user two coins for each action. Five coins can be earned for submitting a Challenge drawing. These coins can then be used to purchase additional drawings. This method of earning coins can be limiting to those users who do not have regular internet access or for those choosing not to participate in the Art Club. It would be nice if additional opportunities for earning coins were included or remove this completely, unlocking all drawings from the start.
