Get out into nature, or your own back yard, and use your phone’s camera to identify the plants and animals around you with Seek by iNaturalist. Plus, young kids can play with six different toy apps packaged together into Kapu Toys’ Digital Toybox.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Seek by iNaturalist
By Naturalist, LLC
Seek encourages kids to go outside and identify the plants and animals around them. Seek uses the camera on your phone or tablet along with a database of observations from the iNaturalist network to try to recognize the plant or animal in front of you. Kids can also run the recognition algorithm on photos in your library to identify past pictures or images from others. Kids can earn badges for scanning species, and the app offers challenges to fulfill. Once a species is identified, the app provides some brief information about it, whether or not it is a native species, a full taxonomy, and similar species. The recognition sometimes works almost instantly, sometimes requires moving the camera around to just the right angle, and sometimes it is unable to identify the species, although it will most often be able to narrow down to the family or genus, with suggestions for what it might be. Obviously it works best when you can get a clear and close up view of your subject, which makes identifying fast moving animals more difficult. I found the recognition to work well, if not perfectly, but certainly well enough to spark curiosity and a desire to explore. I definitely spent much longer than I intended reviewing/enjoying the app. Seek is a great app and perfect for kids that want to get outside and explore.
Digital Toybox
By Kapu Toys
Digital Toybox is a playful app for young kids, incorporating six of Kapu Toys’ apps into a single package. Kapu Forest is available for free with the app and involves kids performing simple interactions to catch bugs, light fireflies feed foxes, and more. The other five games are available for a single in-app purchase. Kids can build crazy buildings hamburger style, create melodies out of colours and turn them into flowers, play with puppets, discover and play mini-games with eight different animals around the world, and simply go fishing. All of the games are simple enough for younger kids, and designed with beautiful graphics and animations.
