Publications about books for children and young adults
The Peanuts gang is back in two new interconnected Loud Crow Interactive apps. A follow-up to last fall’s fabulous A Charlie Brown Christmas app, Loud Crow’s latest story app It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! (October 2012) is based on the 1966 animated holiday TV special of the same name. Linus spends Halloween night in [...]
“Everyone’s story matters,” according to Morris Lessmore, a lifelong lover of books and the title character of William Joyce’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. That’s certainly a worthy notion, and it has made me a champion of this particular story since the animated short film first won an Academy Award in February, [...]
David A. Carter and Noelle Carter’s Bot Garage app (Random House/Smashing Ideas, 2011), a companion to their 2011 counting pop-up book Lots of Bots, invites users to recreate the wacky robots showcased in the book and create their own inventions. Build a robot by selecting from a gallery of ten brightly colored options for each bot [...]
Daniel Striped Tiger, you’ve come a long way, baby. Introduced on the show The Children’s Corner in the 1950s, shy Daniel went on to be one of many puppet inhabitants of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Earlier this month PBS debuted an animated spin-off series featuring his four-year-old son, also named Daniel, and [...]
“Once upon a time there was no alphabet… only numbers.” William Joyce’s app The Numberlys (Moonbot Studios, January 2012) introduces users to a highly detailed, Metropolis-inspired city scape, where a society of cute blobby creatures manufactures numbers. Numbers form the basis of all organization and communication, but this world, though “orderly,” lacks color, creativity, and [...]
At first glance, the premise of the Lazoo Squiggles! (August 2012) app sounded as if it might be interesting for about ten minutes, tops: draw squiggles to make cars go fast, rockets zoom into space, clouds rain, and flowers grow. After a thirty-minute first glance, however, I realized the creators are more imaginative than I [...]
Rounds: Franklin Frog by Barry and Emma Tranter (Nosy Crow, August 2012) is a great interactive nonfiction app for one- to three-year-olds. First in Nosy Crow’s new series of nonfiction apps based on life cycles, Franklin Frog presents the life of a frog — including feeding, hibernation, mating, birth, metamorphosis, and maturation — in an [...]
I saw Disney’s animated movie Tangled when it came out in theaters and since then have seen it countless times. I once watched it eight times in two days. Imagine my delight when I got to play Tangled Storybook Deluxe App (Disney Digital Books, February 2012). Alas, the story doesn’t translate too smoothly to this [...]
Building Titanic, by National Geographic in collaboration with developer Neo-Pangea (released for the Titanic‘s centennial in April 2012), is a stunning nonfiction app for everyone from elementary-aged students to adults. Most Titanic media, understandably, focuses on the ship’s sinking; as the name suggests, this app instead gives an inside look into a remarkable technological achievement: [...]
The star of Benji Davies’s Bizzy Bear board book series and the Bizzy Bear On the Farm app returns in Bizzy Bear Builds a House (Nosy Crow, July 2012). Based on Bizzy Bear: Let’s Get to Work, this app invites toddlers to pitch in around a construction site with Bizzy, completing tasks such as digging [...]
