[appimg 723088101]
App Info
Price: [app 723088101] {price}
AppStore User Rating: {stars}[/app]
Overview
The Adventures of Ash & Ollie: Screentime includes a story teaching children the importance of limiting their screen time, a rocket racer game and a photo album to take pictures of things they like to do when it is not screen time.
Features include:
- Interactive story
- Activities
- Narration
- Page index
- Tutorials
- Fingerprint Network
Quality
Users will find nice quality design elements throughout the story, game and photo album. Graphics include adorable characters, such as Ash, Ollie and their little rabbit friend. The music and interactivity draw the reader into the story.
The page index built into the story allows for easy navigation between pages or returning to the home page.
Education
The storyline is easy to follow and will help children understand why their parents limit their screen time. Most children do not see limiting their screen time as a good idea; the story presents it in a positive manner.
Children will enjoy the narration of the story which is done from Ash and Ollie’s perspective. Having options to mute narration (without muting sounds and music) and text highlighting would be beneficial to young readers as the text is easy to read and this is a story they could use to improve their reading abilities.
Including screen time rules into the interactivity of the story is a clever way to reinforce the important points of the story in a quick and easy manner.
Two short tutorials are included in the app, one for the story and another for the game. Both are done in a way that young users can easily understand and does not require much reading.
Entertainment
While The Adventures of Ash & Ollie’s main purpose is to educate children about screen time and that is done through the story portion, the app does offer a good amount of entertainment.
The story itself is entertaining with the adorable characters and slight humor throughout, but it also offers hidden items, which are then used in the Rocket Racer game. Finding the hidden items is a fun way to keep the reader’s interest without it being distracting.
Rocket Racer requires kids to set the timer for how long they want to play the game and to choose from one of three difficulties. The game is easy even for the youngest users. Kids are able to easily navigate to the game from the main menu or the page index.
One thing I have found to be true since purchasing our first device, kids LOVE to use them to take pictures. This app provides the perfect opportunity for them to do that in a way that is still related to the overall topic of the story. The Adventures of Ash & Ollie includes a photo album as an activity for kids to include pictures of what they like to do when not playing on their device. This is a great tie-in to the story and lesson it is intending to teach. It may be a good way to remind children that playing on their iPads is not the ONLY thing there is to do.
Value
The Adventures of Ash & Ollie is a nice quality universal app that contains a good amount of content and entertainment with an educational spin. Both activities and the story can be replayed which helps stretch the value of an app in this price range.
Features provided by the Fingerprint Network portion of the app are an added benefit for those who desire that functionality.
Child Friendliness
While some find the Fingerprint Network features beneficial, others find them to be too distracting especially when not all features or menus are protected. Ideally, if developers are going to include this functionality in an app they should do so in a manner that does not allow, or attract, their target audience to access areas other than the story and related activities. Providing a protected area for all links, buttons and menus for the Fingerprint Network features and making that button unappealing is much more child-friendly.
Aside from the Fingerprint Network features, the app is rather child friendly; the activities and story are easy to navigate and tie nicely together.
The Adventures of Ash & Ollie: Screentime is a helpful way to educate children about why limiting screen time is important.