It’s time to explore Bimarc’s Home! This app is designed to encourage skill building in preschool age learners in a fun, interactive environment not that different than his or her very own house.
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Get ready to explore! Bimarc’s Home is an early learner app designed to give children fun, interactive ways to build skills like memory, ordination, classification and precision. Your child chooses a friend from the multiethnic collection of pals, and explores Bimarc’s Home room by room with them.
Each room gives children a task or series of tasks to complete, like a matching game, popping bubbles of a certain color and combining ingredients to bake a cake. Each task is explained by a clearly-spoken guide, who provides plenty of praise, encouragement and positive reinforcement along the way.
The Bimarc’s Home iPad app contains hand-drawn animations and provides support for users in three possible languages (English, Castellano and Català). It is well made, yet extremely simple, which is fitting considering the app’s main audience.
I think the true representation of the love and attention that went into this application is most easily ascertained by the detailed educational opportunity descriptions you can find in Bimarc’s Home’s living room, where you can review your child’s progress, see what skills they may need a bit more support on, and get a really good idea of what this app is doing.
Learning is definitely the name of the game in Bimarc’s Home. As I mentioned earlier, the skills this app are trying to drive home are all age-appropriate, and you can even read a description about each of the intended lessons in the home’s living room.
As far as effectiveness goes, some of these tasks hit the mark. Matching games are a classic component of childhood gameplay, and for good reason. Tasks like this give children’s memories a work out, and that is definitely a good thing.
While I do think some of the interactions in Bimarc’s Home are classics, like the matching game, others, like clothing sorting, fall a bit flat for me, and for the kids.
Each time your child chooses a friend to guide them through Bimarc’s home, the games are essentially the same. Sure the placement of the shoes to match might change and the card pairs will be in a different order, but the rooms are identical, the tasks are duplicated. I found myself wishing each friend had a home of their own to show kids around, to give the application more extended gameplay and a better return factor for kids, who tend to get bored if you give them the same task over and over, especially at a preschool age.
Priced reasonably at $1.99, Bimarc’s Home is an interesting application, but the window of opportunity for this app to be interesting or useful for children is quite brief.
I also think for an app that costs a few bucks, we tend to expect more. The activities in Bimarc’s Home are repetitive, and there are too few in my opinion.
One of the perks of reviewing apps specifically designed for kids is that they tend to be safe for kids. That is definitely the case with Bimarc’s Home, which has no social media links or external links, and no advertisements in the gameplay.
There is a link to the Bimarc’s Home Facebook page in the settings area, which is available on almost any screen by tapping the bottom right corner. This is a little too easily accessible for my taste. I would have liked to have seen this link and option only available on the main app page instead, although I do approve of it being tucked in a parents-only area that is behind a small icon.
The same screen lets kids change the app’s language. So just beware that it’s also that easy to change it back if needed!