Review: Peppy Pals Beach introduces toddlers to emotional intelligence.
Bottom Line: This app does a nice job making emotions easy for toddlers to read and while that is commendable, the bulk of the app is just a fun time for them to explore cause and effect with activities and character interactions in a beach setting.
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Our pal, Philip gave the app a try for us. Take a look and then continue reading:
Peppy Pals Beach is based on the idea that emotional intelligence can be taught through fun character gameplay. The app follows several animal friends (horse, dog, cat, bunny and owl) as they play in a beach setting. The app opens to a home screen where children can get right to playing or parents can visit a separate section to subscribe to the newsletter, see additional apps, rate the app and follow the developer on social media.
When kids start playing, they are shown a map with areas of interest. Tapping on these areas begin the activities. Each time children finish a section, more activities are revealed on the map and new activities appear without having to complete sections. Some activities are very clearly all about teaching children how to read the emotions of others. For instance, one activity gives children the ability to manipulate the faces of the animals to show basic emotions such as smiling, surprise, sadness and anger. Other activities that are easy to see this illustrated is giving characters toys to play with. Some toys will make some characters happy while making other characters bored or even annoyed such as giving a hula dancing turtle to the dog who is not impressed.
Group character activities are a tad less straight forward and require children to problem solve. In one activity, the bunny and owl are using a teeter-totter, but the horse wants to play ball and can't get in the play area. Through tapping around with the environment and characters, children are able to get the gate open so that all three friends can be together to play. Another group activity has three of the animals taking turns making dives into the water where they are judged by three crabs. It's not until all three friends dive together that they get the best score. One group activity had me laughing and that's because while several of the characters were having a water balloon fight, a seagull flies by and by tapping the gull, he poops on the dog's head. Luckily, the dog just shakes himself off and barks.
There are also coloring pages within the activities. Some pages are tap and fill coloring, while others are blank pages where children can draw and color their own art. These areas are not saved to the device or within the app, so if a child makes a masterpiece, a parent will need to do a screen shot for posterity.
The app worked well with no bugs. It is cleanly designed and the illustrations are attractive to the age group it's made for. The characters are friendly looking and fun to interact with. I would like the ability to turn off the "more apps" button within the app instead of having to tweak device settings. Overall, I think it's a cute app that toddlers will have fun playing with but in order for kids to get the full learning potential of understanding the feelings of others, a parent is needed to help guide conversation and ask relevant questions that might include, "How do you think the dog felt when the bird pooped on him?" or "What made the horse happy?".
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Cynthia is a proud mother of three and supporter of never getting out of pajamas in the summer. *Smart Apps for Kids was paid a priority review fee for this post.
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