All About the Solar System

The tour of the solar system begins on the home screen with the cartoon robot narrators, Jet and Roy, introducing each other. The robots will take you through each of the sections in turn from the sun all the way out to the dwarf planets. There is another option to navigate on your own by accessing the solar system map, which is basically the main menu of the app. By moving the spaceship graphic you can select the section you want to explore. On every section of the app the map is easily returned to be touching the map icon at the top of the screen.

There are three main topics covered – the Earth-Sun-moon relationships, the planets of the solar system and other objects in the solar system.

Each section will present a cosmic object by displaying satellite photographs, diagrams and simple animations. There is also a body of text to read with some key vocabulary highlighted in red. By touching the word a definition appears. It is simple to navigate in the app using the arrows at the bottom of the screen and you can continue with the next section or return to the previous one.

The interactive graphics for the ‘Earth-Sun-moon relationship’ topic are impressive as well as being effective for the learner to grasp some complicated motion concepts. The best of these are for the lunar cycle, changes in tides and both types of eclipses. By moving the objects around the graphics respond by displaying how this affects what we see from Earth. The ‘planets of the solar system’ topic presents about a dozen statistics on each of the planets such as distance from the sun, temperature and surface gravity compared to the Earth’s. The user can also zoom in on the planet and see an image of the surface. The final topic presents other celestial bodies include the dwarf planets, asteroids, meteoroids and comets.

Back on the home screen there are additional icons so you can find out more about the developer and adjust the general settings of the app. The standard options of background music, sound effects and language select are available as well as the option of using the app in tutorial mode. The tutorial mode is definitely a useful way of initially getting to grips with moving about the app.

With the level of detailed text and science information this app is best suited for late primary school or early post-primary. However, the cartoon theme and rich graphics will help to engage younger learners. Unfortunately there are no means to assess the learning of the user throughout this educational app. An ‘end of topic’ quiz or a variation of space-themed games could be a nice addition in future versions to gauge the progress of the learner. Most of the graphic point out that they are not to scale and it could also be worth including a scale model to compare sizes of objects or the vast distances between them.