This month, create a world and watch it spring to life with Topia World Creator. Race marbles through crazy physics-based 2D courses to see which one will win in Labo Marble Ball Race. Go back in time to see how the dinosaurs lived in World of Dinosaurs. Finally, practice multiplication, division, fractions and more in the new Duolingo Math.
Topia World Creator: New Life
By Yateland Learning Games for Kids
Topia World lets kids design and create fantasy worlds. Starting with one of the many pre-built maps or a blank canvas, kids kids can place trees, grass, buildings, fences, paths, docks, tents, balloons, fountains and more. Then they can add people to their creation, set a path for them to follow, give them a mood, and then watch their world come to life. It reminds me a bit of the Busytown books with all of the detail and activity happening all at once. Three areas are available for free, with many more requiring in-app purchases.
Labo Marble Ball Race
By Labo Lado Co., Ltd.
Labo Marble Ball Race lets kids watch marbles race through quirky and fun courses. The marbles can be given country flags, colours, or even images of planets and are set loose through convoluted physics based two-dimensional arenas. Marbles may fall down a ramp, get shot out of a cannon, roll down pipes, dodge giant monsters, and much, much more. Kids put together some of the pieces of the course and they can either do so as intended, or play around with putting things in different places. Then the marbles spin around dramatically in a giant drum and are launched into the course to bounce around and see which one will finish first. It’s a fun and interesting twist on physics games.
World of Dinosaurs: KIDS
By World of Dinosaurs
World of Dinosaurs: Kids is a book app with animated information about dinosaurs and their world, plus augmented-reality (AR) models of dinosaurs. The information portion contains beautifully detailed pictures covering different types of dinosaurs, different time periods, fossils, extinction, other animals of the time, and even what the earth looked like at different points in history. Kids can also bring up a few paragraphs of information about each page with narration (but not word highlighting). When they’ve finished the book, there are 6 popular dinosaurs in AR that they can bring into the real world through the camera on their device. World of Dinosaurs is a beautiful app with a good amount of basic kid-friendly information and worth a look for young dinosaur enthusiasts.
Duolingo Math: Learn, Practice
By Duolingo
Duolingo Math takes Duolingo’s language learning lessons and replaces them with math quizzes. It focuses on multiplication, division, fractions, measurement, angles and more with units of themed questions. The questions are sometimes simple multiple choice answers, but also sometimes involve adding together visual groups of unit boxes, moving arrow to create angles, filling in the blanks on equations or sequences, or even writing answers on screen with handwriting recognition. Unfortunately, Duolingo Math lacks the charm and animation of Duolingo ABC, and it does require creating an account. Fortunately, you can jump ahead to the area of math you want to focus on (say skipping over multiplication to focus on angles). For adults, the app offers a ‘brain training’ mode which repackages and condenses the lessons. Duolingo Math is a polished take on math practice.
