Kidoodle: Pirate Scribblebeard – an Interactive Coloring app for Kids
by Toni McQuilken
Feb 7, 2012 10:50 AM –
Install
Kidoodle: Pirate Scribblebeard is a decent interactive coloring app for Android and iOS tablet devices. The storyboard leads kiddies through several pages and encourages their young imagination to scribble, paint or draw right on the story; plus these creations can be animated.
Price: Free, $2.99
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- A great app for kids to play with on any Android tablet.
- Pages give kids a place to start with a broad idea, then let them draw whatever they want.
- Parents can set up an email address so kids can send their creations to them.
Cons
- The lite version didn’t fit the whole screen, and only came with three pages.
- The tutorial showed up every time I went to the first page, and there is no way to speed it up or skip over it.
- There are only a few colors to choose from.
- There is one pen tip, and one fill tip, and that’s all, so limited.
Features:
Pirate Scribblebeard is a fantastic app to get kids imaginations going. It is designed for kids, and comes with two characters, Josephine and Oscar, who give a light guidance as to what to draw on each page, then let the kids go to town. On the lite version, there are only three different pages to choose from. In the full version, there are a total of 14 different pages, all with a different starter outline, such as a bathtub, with the suggestion that this pirate ship needs some work. Another page is a blank aquarium, and encourages kids to draw the fish they might see. But while there are these general idea starters, kids can draw right over the lines and create their own work of pirate-themed art if they want to.
Another cute feature is that when kids leave the page, either to send their art to a parent, or to go draw on another page, there is a basic animation, like the pirates they just drew dancing, or the ship sailing on water. It doesn’t add a lot, but it is a nice little interactive features.
Speaking of parents, at the setup of the app, parents can input both their child’s name, and their own name and email address, so kids can, at the press of a button, send their art to the set email address without having to input anything. This is another nice feature that allows kids to share their work.
Some of the things I didn’t like include the limited color choices. I understand that the app is made for kids, but there are only eight basic colors, and two tips – a pencil to draw with and a fill tool if they wanted to color large areas. The lack of tips I’m okay with – most young kids won’t change from the one basic draw tip, so that’s okay. But the lack of color options kind of bothered me. Kids usually like colors, and like to experiment with colors – hence why crayons come in boxes of sometimes a hundred at a time. So to limit it to so few seems like it really then limits the apps to very, very young children who won’t really know the difference. As soon as a kid gets old enough to start to really recognize different colors, they’re going to be searching for more.
Another thing I didn’t like was that, in the lite version, the app didn’t scale properly. I can understand only having a few page options – that gives parents incentive to buy the app, while letting them really see if the kids will play with it with a few starter pages. However, on my tablet, while the fill version filled the whole screen, the lite version filled maybe two-thirds of the screen, making it much harder for young fingers to navigate, and giving kids a much smaller space to play with. Since the app is made for tablets only – it doesn’t even show up in the app store for my phone – this seems to be an odd choice.
Watch on Mobile
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Kidoodle Start
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Kidoodle Settings
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Kidoodle News
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Kidoodle Pages
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Kidoodle Coloring Page
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Kidoodle Character
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Kidoodle Color Choices
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Kidoodle Erase
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Kidoodle Email
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Kidoodle Save
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Kidoodle Lite Screen Issue
Usefulness:
This is actually a very cute app for a parent to have on their tablet to give to the kids to play with. It helps spur creativity, gives them something to draw on, and offers enough page variety that it will keep kids busy for a while. However, I question whether or not you’re going to want to give a young child, the demographic here, your very expensive tablet to play with, especially without supervision.
Ease of Use:
The app is very easy to use – setup can be done at the first launch, or it can be accessed later easily. Pages are easy to switch between, and the tools themselves are obvious. It won’t take most kids long to figure out how to use it and be drawing.
Frequently Used:
This depends on how often you want to give your tablet to your child. As I mentioned above, I would have a hard time giving a young child my expensive tablet to play with, since the age range this is geared toward might not be very gentle. On the other side, there is a wide range of inexpensive Android tablets, and this might be a good choice if you’re building one for your child to use exclusively.
Interface:
In the lite version, I have some issues with the way the app scales, since it makes the interface a bit more difficult to use, especially when you think about young, more uncoordinated fingers trying to navigate it. However, in the full version, this is less of an issue, since it does fit the full screen. The tools themselves, while limited, are self-explanatory enough, I believe, for a child to figure them out after being shown how to use them once or twice.
Tags:
Android App,
Android Apps,
Android Tablet Apps,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Children's Apps,
Kidoodle,
Kidoodle: Pirate Scribblebeard,
Pirate Scribblebeard
Categorised in: Education, Entertainment
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