My Voyage App Review
App Info
Price: Free
Overview
The My Voyage app will take users on an elaborate adventure through documentary-like videos, games, and more as the main characters explore Hawaiian and Polynesian history and culture. The main characters learn history and ancient skills like weaving and boat-making of the Polynesian people who later settled in Hawaii. In the process, they also discover solid traditional values like caring for the earth and respecting elders.
Features include:
- Over 30 minutes of live-action video
- Video encounters with Hawaiian cultural experts
- A variety of interactive activities
- Visual and auditory instruction in Hawaiian words
- Parent and teacher guides with supplemental curriculum
Quality
My Voyage is a very high quality app. It’s well designed for the target age group of young elementary-aged students, but the rich and varied content will make it appeal to older children and even adults. Developers are right when they advertise that it makes a great family activity!
Education
My Voyage is very educational. It makes social studies come alive through accessible and age-appropriate video that does not talk down to children, and interactive activities. The information conveyed is unusual, and not a topic that most people will be very familiar with, no matter what their age.
Each section begins with a high-quality video that follows the main characters on their journey to learn more about their culture and history. The children encounter a host of helpful people who make the lessons come alive. Then users are invited to play an interactive game related to the topic of the segment. The games are varied, and sometimes demand dexterity and coordination and other times tap into mental agility. There is a very nice variety!
Best of all, the app makes seamless transitions from the real-life video segments to the animated and interactive sections. Viewers get so caught up in the experience that they hardly notice moving from one to the other.
A host of positive values are stressed throughout the app, as well. Respect for diversity, care for the environment, learning lessons from history, and listening to elders are just a few of the values stressed in subtle ways by every aspect of the app.
Entertainment
This app is highly engaging and entertaining, and it’s quite likely that kids will not want to put it down until going all the way through it, then they will come back to it again and again. There are over 30 minutes of video interspersed with at least eight interactive activities. Best of all, the developers indicate that this is the first in a planned series. I can’t wait to see what comes next!
Value
This app costs 99 cents on the App Store, and that’s a great value. It will take approximately 45 minutes to go through the activities one time, and many are made to randomize on each play through, so they will be different when your child comes back to them. The app is extremely high-quality and well-made, and so is well-worth the minimal investment.
Child Friendliness
My only complaint about this app is that there is an open and unprotected link to your web browser on the front page, right where young children would be likely to find it easily. The link opens a page that tells how to access the teacher and parent guides as well as supplemental lesson plans, but it would be easy for a youngster to get out onto the open internet with no protections. This link should be behind a parent gate!
- Parent area
- NO social media
- NO 3rd party ads
- NO in-app purchase
- YES unprotected link to open internet that contains parent/teacher information
