Flip Flap Farm App Review
App Info
Price: $0.99
Overview
Flip Flap Farm is a flipbook with a twist. In this non-traditional story, kids control the content. Instead of simply creating unique animals as they flip the pages, kids get to read a story about them as they go. They can discover that if a girrel can’t find grass, it’ll eat their clothes and bury acorns while a gicken also eats clothes and is great at laying eggs. Kids can make squabbits, purkeys and a host of other animals just by swiping from page to page.
Accompanying the descriptions of each animal are classic animal pictures and sounds to help kids envision the unique animals they are creating. They can quickly discover what a gicken, a cow crossed with a chicken would look like or laugh as they give a pig a squirrel’s legs to create a pirrel.
Features include:
- Cute graphics
- Interactive story
- Animal sound effects
Quality
Flip Flap Farm features detailed graphics, entertaining colors and crisp British voice that reads the descriptions of the animals. As kids swipe from animal to animal to create new and crazy creatures, the app responds with a satisfying swiping sound and quickly begins reading the new animal’s description as soon as it determines kids are ready to take a break from swiping through. Even the fastest swiping fingers are no match for the speed of this app.
Education
Like most digital storybooks, Flip Flap Farm offers two ways for kids to interact with the story – a read and play version and a version where kids can read it themselves. In both versions, key words in the text are bolded helping kids learn to recognize them. In the read and play version the text is also highlighted as it is read and the narrator reads the text at a speed that makes it easy for kids to follow along. One feature the text lacks is the ability to tap on and hear individual words pronounced. While this may not be a problem in the read and play version, it may prove frustrating to kids who opt to read it themselves and have trouble pronouncing the new animal names or reading some of the key words.
Entertainment
Flip Flap Farm’s silliness factor is sure to entertain kids. Many will ignore the descriptions and simply focus on making creating their own crazy animals, laughing as they give a goat a cow’s legs or replace a rabbit’s head with the head of a chicken. Kids who stop creating crazy new animals long enough to read or listen to the descriptions will be rewarded with silly names and short rhymes.
Value
This digital storybook is based on a popular hardback children’s book with the same name. Parents could opt to purchase a hard copy of the book, but the app version of the story offers the same experience for a fraction of the price. With all of the possible creatures kids can create they will be able to read through this story multiple times and not read the same text twice.
Child Friendliness
Kids of all ages will enjoy reading Flip Flap Farm. It is easy for even toddlers to swipe through the pictures and create their own crazy creatures and once they have started to read the story kids will be able to swipe through the animal pictures and create new creatures to their heart’s content. That is because getting out of the app requires some work. Navigation icons are dimmed so that kids must tap them twice to move within the app. To access the help features, grown-ups are instructed to swipe up, down, left or right with two fingers before accessing the help or settings pages.
