Silly Street Learn & Play

The application is straightforward to download and takes up a very modest 75MB of space. The start screen immediately draws you into either playing with the app or the game board with a cute American boy speaking instructions. Clicking on the ‘Go Play’ button sends you to another screen where the boy asks how many players and then the next screen is a quick process of finding a funny icon for each player. The next screen lets the user choose a card pack, up to three or just a ‘surprise me’ button which is a mixture from all the packs. With the final instructions of ‘Tap’ to flip a card and ‘Swipe’ to discard and keeping the score on the board the first card is revealed for the first player.

Each card will carry a set of instructions or dialogue and inform the player how many spaces they will move forward if it is deemed correctly carried out, this is left up to either a democratic decision or parent/carer decision! For example, the first card we played was “Hey Cap’n! Time to leave the port! But the seas look a little rough. Tell us how you’ll be brave and lead your mates?” As you can see this is quite a difficult task and will require a fair amount of thinking for the child to then describe to the crew how they will motivate them. Once the task is complete the scoreboard can be updated with either a thumbs up or down, the progress is shown by a running line being coloured in running alongside the other players, to enable an instant picture of who is ahead. Once this is done the second player comes up and repeats the same process with a different card.

The application has a rich variety of packs to choose from:
- Wild Cards pack for children to explore animals and build creativity, communication & grit!
- Big Heart Cards to build empathy.
- Pirate Cards to build courage 
- Woods Cards to build creativity and adaptable thinking
- Boardwalk Cards to build bravery & creativity!
- Sensational Cards to build awareness!

Overall, this is a very good game. When the developers claim that these card games can build creativity, empathy, courage etc they are making no idle claim. The cards do have a rich variety of activities and they get children thinking and doing within a group play situation where things really are learnt.

Other packs are available as in app purchases to extend the use of the overall game: Happiest Holidays Cardpack

The Cat Pack

Lil Foodies Cards

This is a game I will certainly be playing with my grandchildren over the festive season and I would suggest it would be something other grandparents, parents and teachers should consider. Certainly, a refreshing find to see that application developers understand that it is all about aspects of playing with other people in a group, face to face that derives the most benefit to children’s development.