Curious George at the Zoo for iPad app review: visit the zoo with George

Curious George at the Zoo for iPad 

Price: $0.99

About the App
Curious George at the Zoo by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is designed to help children develop their reading and cognitive skills through a variety of fun activities, such as visiting different animal attractions, collecting stickers, and playing a variety of mini-games. The app was updated to Version 1.5 on October 29, 2012. 

User Experience
This app will provide hours of fun and excitement for children, while teaching them important skills. You can explore the zoo in 3-D using the pop-up menu, enabling you to visit the different animals in their enclosures. Children will learn about the behavior of the various animals, including things such as what they do like and don’t like to eat.

Features
Each enclosure has its own game that will help children to develop their memory, reasoning, and sorting skills, while also developing their motor skills with various gestures like tapping, dragging, pinching, and so on.

This app also includes videos of animals in their natural habitats with some great audio narration by the Man in the Yellow Hat, teaching kids lots of new things about different animals in a fun and friendly manner.

You can also collect stickers and use them to create pictures and save them to your own photo album.

In-app purchases
Curious George at the Zoo - Deep Freeze  $0.99
Curious George at the Zoo - Old MacDonald's FARM $0.99
Curious George at the Zoo - The Outback  $0.99

Update Info
Curious George at the Zoo is currently running on Version 1.5. The latest update fixed a number of issues surrounding using the camera from within the app and iOS 6.

Customer Ratings and Feedback Comments
The app currently has six customer ratings with an average rating of three out of five stars. The biggest complaint from customers seems to be the minimal amount of content that comes with the initial purchase of the app. The initial stages of the game really don’t last very long and you have to pay for in-app purchases to unlock additional content.

Personal Comments by Reviewer
My initial impression was one of disappointment when I read the comments from customers saying that the amount of content included in the initial purchase was very small. Despite this, I really like the app and think the rest of the content is well worth paying for.

My suggestion would be to try your child with the initial purchase and see how they like it. I do like that the additional content is available for download in individual pieces to make things cheaper.

The videos are very fun and educational, and I think the idea of collecting stickers is great and adds an element of progression the game play which I think will really help to keep kids interested.

Pros
• Great for developing kids’ motor skills
• Great for developing memory and reasoning skills
• Everything is presented in a fun and approachable way, which really helps to keep children engaged and attentive
• A variety of styles, from informative and educational to fun and entertaining

Cons
• There isn’t a large amount of content included in the initial purchase

For: iPad with iOS 4.2 or later