My Little Place

One category of apps that rarely yields surprises is that made up of simple mini-games for young children, and yet this is exactly what this app provides.  Other apps consist of themed mini-games but this one seems to turn the device into one no longer meant for adults.   The menu screen looks as you would expect a device’s home page to look if it was to be used only by young children.

Each icon leads to a simple to play but graphically and sonically rich interactive experience.    The theme is cleverly built on within these icons.  The phone app encourages children to press numbers, weather takes children to a screen where they can activate different weather effects, and the settings screen lets children customise how the app will look.  These make the child’s own place on the device, in line with the app’s name, look just like their parents’ section, except more fun.

The games themselves are of the sort that an adult can look at and wonder what their purpose is but that young children actually love.  Tapping and dragging all sorts of on-screen elements are rewarded with sounds and animations.  The purpose that an adult might feel is missing is not a problem for the imagination and sense of fun inherent in the children that this app is aimed at.

The eleven mini-games included in the app so far are diverse.  There are ones that involve matching shapes and pictures, musical ones, and number based ones.  The place holders on the main screen suggest that many more are planned.  They are free from time and rule restrictions so that children are free to play for as long or as short as they like and how they like.

Children will be happy seeing what effects they can cause by interacting with the app but, because of its flexible play mechanics, My Little Place is just as useful as a focus of play between parent and child.  You can create your own purpose to them such as counting or identifying shapes.  This would counter the one issue you may find with this app: that it does not use any speech.  Some of the mini-games would be given a new educational dimension if they spoke the number or shape that was being interacted with.

Within this genre of apps you may have encountered more than one that has rough edges to the graphics, or sounds that are not quite as clean and crisp as you would like, but this is certainly not the case with this one.  Every aspect of its production is as clean and polished as you could hope for.  There are a number of little touches to prompt engagement, even on the menu screen when left untouched for a little while.

With a clear path to expansion, a good range of existing games and its excellent idea of mimicking the software children see their parents use, this is an app that can be expected to get plenty of use.

You can download My Little Place on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.