FunBoard
Developer:
coolkidsoftwareRelease Date:
10 August 2009Version:
1.0Price:
FreeEditor Rating
I’ll be frank. I’m a little confused by FunBoard.
Created by CoolKidSoftware and available for free on iTunes, this kids app is purported to be educational and catered toward younglings from the age of 18 months to roughly 4 years of age, but after some thorough tinkering on my part, and on the part of the curious, chubby, and slightly mischievous fingers of a dear 4 year old niece, FunBoard is anything but fun, and technically, anything but a board.
The app opens to a blue screen with lines radiating outward like sunbeams, or a playful circus tent, with round blue circles dotted here and there. Five images pulsate slowly in a revolving circle, each image zooming in and out, the images clockwise being what looks to be a spaceship with green amoebas, a frog, a bell, a caterpillar, and a robot. No sounds are heard on the main page, and it’s up to the child to start tapping away on the images. Tap on one of them – let’s say the bell – and a zippy, synthesized sound effect is heard, then all the images kaleidoscope down into a tiny bit of bird feed at the bottom of a screen, where a small bluebird squawks in a croaking bullfrog tone, gulps down the shrunken images, and then a new screen pops up with a blown up image of the one you tapped on.
Should you tap on the bell, the bell image is enlarged in the center of the screen, with a completely random and irrelevant backdrop of a road in a grassy plain, heading toward cloudy skies. Every now and then a rattling sound is heard and two googly eyes will appear on the bell. Tap on the bell and the bell will ring. I know, what fun, right? The little bluebird remains slumbering peacefully in the bottom left of the screen, his tummy pulsing in and out, and manages to look cute doing so. To return to the main screen, your child has to figure out that he must tap the bird, waking him with a squawk and a blink of the eyes. The robin will bounce to the middle of the screen, a heavy laden thud to his bouncy steps, and he will lay an egg, out of which comes the main screen with all five images blown up to regular size again in some cheesy, simplistic animation not unfamiliar to beginning web designs of the mid 1990s.
To make matters more confusing, try “playing” around – I say playing slightly tongue-in-cheek as I’m not entirely sure what word would better describe the actions involved in this game – with the frog. At least the frog’s backdrop makes sense, sitting him on a lily pad with reeds flush in the marshy setting. The rattle is heard still, any time a few seconds go by without any discernable tapping on the screen. However, the frog interaction elevates from the mere confusion involved with the bell, to an eerie, and slightly perturbing one. Tap the frog and he croaks, and then, whether you continue tapping him or not, he will smile, then become straight-faced, pout with sad, downcast eyes, and then snarl at you, eyes a menacing, red hued glare, his body shaking, and a creepy, buzzy “grrrrr” directed at you. I don’t see anything fun about having a frog creepily glare and snarl at you.
The same goes for the caterpillar, only instead of him glaring at you, any time you touch him, the poor caterpillar develops an expression of utmost pain or annoyance or both, eyes squinted shut, teeth braced, his body writhing beneath your finger. A bleating bird chirp is heard, as well – apparently mean to be the winching sound of his body moving in that undulating caterpillar movement -, when you drag him around screen in some bizarre, torture display. It’s quite the turn-off.
The robot one is fairly boring, just allowing you to stretch his robotic legs up or down (what, no stretching of the arms? No left and right movement? No robotic “beep boop bops” or lasers or anything more interesting and interactive? Come on now.), but I’ll give a little kudos for the strange, alien one. A family of green amoeba blobs, with eyelashes for the female, a flower and blue baseball cap for the little girl and little boy amoeba, respectively, are set before a spaceship, with space and a planet in the background. While the creatures and the spaceship are among the most unimaginative conceptions I’ve seen (it’s hard for me to describe the spaceship, it’s so lacking in defining details), I liked how tapping on each of the aliens results in a different musical note, almost like a condensed symphony or organ piano, with the spaceship giving a vibrating diaphone tone. Too bad the musical tones have absolutely no relation to the alien images at hand… this isn’t Close Encounters of the Third Kind caliber.
Despite FunBoard being free, I’m not sure what use your child, or even you, could get out of it. There’s really nothing to do. There is a slightly eerie feel to the game – if you could even call it a game – and its educational components are seriously lacking, providing little interaction, little fun, and little instinctual guidance that caters to the young mind. CoolKidSoftware claims they were inspired to create FunBoard from the UK Government’s Early Years Foundation Stage program, but I feel like this is just a cheap way to give credence or merit to the app, attaching it to some government source of psychological and behavioral research. FunBoard does nothing to incite investigation and exploration, does not develop spatial awareness skills, differentiate between numbers and counting, and most of all, does nothing to improve language skills, which is what EYFS is all about.
I say avoid this one, readers.
Categorized as: Apps for Kids,Apps for Moms,Education,Educational,Entertainment,Free Apps,Games,Kids,Special Categories
Wow. That’s one bad review! Firstly EYFS is not to do with literacy, here’s their webpage rather than the news article you pointed to: http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/earlyyears
EYFS covers all areas of child development from birth to 60 months.
As far as you finding the game “creepy” you’re entitled to your opinion, but when you start to say “glaring” when you mean “looking” I can’t help feeling that you’re being deliberately and excessively negative.
The caterpillar is clearly giggling (rather than in “utmost pain”) and this has been mentioned, unprompted by several children. Taking a screen shot mid laugh to try to prove your point is taking
things rather to far I feel. Especially as it’s fairly easy for anyone to download the game and check.
When looking at the educational aspects, please keep in mind that this application is for very young children (starting at around 18 months).
The kinds of things it addresses are things that we as adults take for granted, but nonetheless still need to be developed in young children. Educationally we’re talking about children that only have simple language
skills and before they are able to count to 10. At this stage, even having the dexterity needed to touch the right portion of the screen is something that needs to be learned. When children are about 18months,
they can’t ‘tap’ the screen, they tend to rub it. If you’d had access to an 18 month year old, you might have noticed that. This is why the bell scene works if you rub the bell rather than requiring you to ‘touch’ it in
the conventional way, this is to prevent a small child getting frustrated or not understanding and giving up.
The Robot scene that you find boring gets children used to the idea of tall and short and simply provides some familiarity with number symbols which are in the background while they’re having fun.
That’s in the EYFS site linked to above: Development 22-36 months > Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy > Shape, Space and Measures > “understanding variations in size”
Another example, the frog scene is related to emotional development.
Again from the EYFS site: Development 16-22 months > Personal social and emotional development > Making relationships > “Responds to others’ pleasure and distress; shows empathy”
Your description of this part of the app is not quite correct, the emotion of the frog changes each time you touch it, from happy to sad to angry to shy. Most children are able to recognise the emotions of the frog,
with the shy emotion being the most difficult, but then even recognising their own emotions is something that children need to learn. These aims are particularly helped by playing the game with the children
and as we recommend in the app description saying things like: “Oh! its sad, I wonder what made it sad” “Now its feeling happy” “How do you feel?”"
A number of the features you mention are design decisions made as a result of focussing the game on children.
There is no ‘home’ icon to take you back to the main menu
as a picture of a small house means nothing to someone who has never had experience of a browser like internet explorer. The sleeping bird you describe is used as a way for the children to navigate through the
application and if you think that the animation looks “90s”, that is a particularly adult perspective. The children do indeed have to work out that they need to touch the bird to move back to the menu but then in the same article you say “FunBoard does
nothing to incite investigation and exploration”. Again, we have used no arrows to indicate to the child what they should do next (although that would have been easier) instead as a prompt, if after a short time
there has been no activity, the items that can be pressed, wiggle and the “rattle” sound you mention is heard. This rarely happens anyway, when an adult encounters FunBoard for the first time, they look at it and wonder what to
do next, when a child encounters it, the just press everything on the screen. I don’t know why this is, I image it’s to do with not being afraid of doing the wrong thing or breaking it. But this is how the app works.
We have also not included any verbal/text based instructions because the children using this game are not expected to know how to read yet and there are no buttons that a child can press accidentally that link to
a web site
Of course as children get older, the educational aspects become less relevant as by now they will have moved on. It still seems to keep a 3 year old fairly well occupied, but not to the same extent as an
18month child. Perhaps I should shorten the age range that we recommend as it is in the education category?
Hello Eric,
I’m sorry you feel this way about my review. I admit, a one-star rating wouldn’t please me were I an app developer, but hopefully, I would try to take some insight from the review (however bad or good, lacking in quality or not) and reevaluate my app as I saw fit. I did have some positive things to say about your app, about the musical tones, for example, and expanding on that would be an excellent idea. Rather than dwelling on my critical (not negative) statements regarding your app – after all, I am but one reviewer – perhaps you should note that if I felt so strongly about certain features – the frog, the caterpillar – then entertain the possibility that maybe there’s a smidgen of merit to my claims. My job as a reviewer is not to aggressively slander apps without due cause. Perhaps my description of the caterpillar “writhing in pain” was a bit sensationalist, but I stand firm on my stance about some of the animals’ emotions being a bit hard to interpret (I should mention I tested this app on my 4 year old niece, and a 2 year old neighbor, both of whom were slightly perturbed by the frog, and perplexed by the caterpillar). My opinion on the design of the app, I agree, is definitely from an adult perspective, and granted adults will be the ones purchasing the app, their opinions on aesthetics are not to be undermined.
As for your claim of being influenced by EYFS, I performed even more additional research on the program, and I’m still a bit confounded as to how your app follows some of its principles. Had you simply created this app for the entertainment and slight educational value for children, that would be fine; adding in a tie to EYFS seems a tad overwrought. After reading your blog response to my review, I would like to defend my stance on child development – I am not completely ignorant.
I am sorry we disagree, but I hope you understand that I am but one reviewer. Just because I disagree does not mean my review is lacking in quality or is inaccurate. If you truly believe in your app, and you wish to improve it and continue promoting it, then I wish you the best. Perhaps I’ll write a review more pleasing to your sentiments next time.
Thank you,
Jackie Judge