Happy App Friday
Learn instruments and put a band together with “Tiny Orchestra,” then do some serious math practice with “Place Value Addition.” Plus, why children’s entertainment companies are making the switch to digital, and a warning about an App Store email scam.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Tiny Orchestra
by Bambi Kids
“Tiny Orchestra” is a music app for learning about and identifying instruments. It contains three sections, the first of which displays the instruments and has them play scales or brief musical pieces. The second section gets kids to identify the instruments they hear, which is easy when there’s only one instrument, but more challenging when two or three play at the same time. Finally, kids can put together their own orchestra by placing multiple animated players on a stage. Instruments range from the expected piano and violin to the more unusual (in a music app) balalaika and bagpipe. The animations are fun and a bit quirky, and the sound quality is excellent.
Place Value Addition
by Esa Helttula
Now updated to version 2.0, “Place Value Addition” is a math app for learning and practicing addition of two and three digit numbers. There are no games included, just a focus on math. The app thoroughly breaks down the process of addition using place values and converting the digits into groups of tokens. Kids then combine groups of tokens together, regroup tokens when needed, and then convert back to numbers, to get a more intuitive sense of the process of adding large numbers together.
Kid-Safe Media in Demand
YouTube is investing 100 million dollars for content to be included in the YouTube Kids app, after settling with the FTC for violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Of course, that’s where all the kids are, including my own who aren’t the least bit interested in traditional TV.
Fake App Store Receipts
We recently received a very convincing email receipt (supposedly) from Apple claiming we’d spent a lot of money on gems in an app, including a link to refund the purchase if we didn’t make it. After the initial moment of panic, we looked at the ‘from’ address and determined that it didn’t actually come from Apple. Of course, the whole point was to get us to click the refund link, send us to a fake log-in site and then steal our account details.
This is an older scam, but it appears to be making the rounds again.
Here’s the official page on identifying legitimate emails
