Learn the life stories of nice women from history and modern times with the wonderfully illustrated and animated Extraordinary Women. Plus Toca Boca turns 10 and what have we learned from the past year of online schooling.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Extraordinary Women
By Learny Land
Extraordinary Women tells the stories of nine women ranging from Ada Lovelace who essentially was the first computer programmer in history, to the modern activist Greta Thunberg, to Junko Tabei who climbed the highest mountains on every continent, and many more. Their stories are beautifully animated and narrated, and some pages include elements such as puzzles or interactive animations. The app also includes a tree where each blossom is a question you can answer about yourself. Questions include foods or colours you like, what you want to improve, your first memory, etc, and these can be answered with text, photos, drawings or voice memos. Extraordinary Women is a well-designed and highly polished app and worth a look.
Toca Boca Sale
Toca Boca is celebrating 10 years and they’ve created a lot of apps over the years. Roughly a dozen of these apps have gone on sale for 99 cents each, including Toca Nature, Toca Kitchen 2, Toca Life: Town and more. See their App Store preview page here: https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/toca-boca-ab/id419103351.
A Year of Screens
In the chaos of the past year, many schools went to an online learning model, and many kids had to find ways to interact with their friends without being with them in person. Needless to say, the changes have been massive, messy and unprecedented. We aren’t going to know definitively what worked and what didn’t for some time, but we can at least start to pool our experiences. This Washington Post article gives a series of anecdotes on the experiences of a spectrum of parents and their kids, both positive and negative.
“A year of everyone turning to technology has shown us that the worth, or danger, of devices has less to do with the glowing screens themselves, and more to do with how they are used. What appears to matter most is the support systems that children and their parents have available to them.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/05/screen-time-one-year-kids/
