My Town: School App Review
App Info
Price: $2.99
Overview
My Town is a collection of virtual paper-doll apps that give children the opportunity to explore places around the town through play. In the latest release, My Town: School, children can play and explore in a school building. Complete with students, teachers, classrooms and more, your child will have plenty of fun creating fun stories and adventures in school!
Children enter the school in a main foyer and there are several places to explore from there! Visit the cafeteria, bathrooms, music classroom, science classroom and more! They can add more students or teachers and manipulate the objects in each room to go along with the imaginary story they create. As they move and tap the interactive elements in each room, occasionally hearts are uncovered that they can collect as well. The hearts go into a gift box at the bottom of the screen but I am unsure what happens when all of the hearts are collected. Every time the child opens the app, they start fresh and new stories can be created!
I can see several ways that this app can be utilized to benefit the lives of children who play it. First of all, if you have a child who is reluctant to go to school or visit new places, playing with these apps can be a very fun and non-threatening way to introduce children to these places so that they are more familiar when they do visit them. It is also a valuable tool that can be used in play therapy for children. Their thoughts and emotions can be shared and worked through as they play with these fun and likable characters! Finally, it can be used to encourage imaginary play as well as work on fine motor skills for young children.
My own children have no really been fans of the My Town apps. Previously, I had the opportunity to review the Daycare app from this collection. My kids enjoyed the apps for a few minutes as they went into each room and moved things around. However, that’s about all the longer they wanted to play. Some of the smaller items were a little difficult to place correctly, and my youngest got a bit frustrated trying to get the objects to go where he wanted them. Also, while the graphics are very high-quality and vibrant, the interactive elements of them are minimal and didn’t really do enough to keep my kids engaged. However, like I stated before, I can see several applications where this app could be beneficial and valuable. But for the everyday play needs of my kids, it didn’t do much for us.
