Happy App Friday
Sing along with Hip Hop Kangaroo while learning letters, numbers and colors. Play with shapes and create works of art with “Digitalwerkstatt Art Studio.” Plus, how has smartphone use changed among teens and tweens over the last four years.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Hip Hop Kangaroo & Friends
by Luca Entertainment Pty Ltd
Hip Hop Kangaroo (plus Poppy Platypus and Kula Koala) contains a series of music videos for kids covering topics like counting, opposites, letters, colors and more. Each video appears to be shot at real locations in Australia with puppets, and the production values are very good. In addition to the videos, there’s a sing-a-long feature that uses your device’s camera to put your child into the video. There’s also a soundboard where you can get the characters to say pre-recorded phrases, for fun. There are subtitles for many different languages, but the videos remain in English.
Digitalwerkstatt Art Studio
by HABA Digital GmgH
Art Studio is a simple vector art program, letting kids create pictures using a set of shapes, such as rectangles, triangles, curved lines, stars and more. Shapes can be freely positioned, rotated, sized and stretched, and coloured with separate lines and fill colours, and brought forward or backward in the scene using layers. You can easily manipulate things after they are placed to get the image just right. Pictures can then be saved to your photos if desired. The app doesn’t appear to allow importing photos or freehand drawing. What it does, it does well and is a simple and intuitive way to create art.
The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2019
Common Sense Media has released their report on what has essentially become smartphone use by kids aged 8 to 18 in the U.S. They also compare it to the data they collected in 2015 to give a sense of what trends may be forming.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2019
You can view the info graphic here:
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/Media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2019-infographic
