I was really excited to get a chance to try this app out and give it a review here on the blog. I've never reviewed anything but books here so this is a little new for me.
I should start by saying that I don't use the iPad all that much. I love my iPhone and am pretty much glued to it, but its my little four-year-old niece Ella who is the iPad addict, and it was her I had in mind when I heard about the chance to review this new app.
The version of the Beginner's Bible App that I got a chance to review contained a free story pack and it was implied that further story packs could be purchased to add on to the program going forward.
There are two main components to the program. There is a Read component where the Bible story is read out loud like a story book with background music and (a little bit of) animation. Then there is a Play component where the kids get to interact with the story.
The Read component was pretty straightforward. The basic Bible stories are heavily paraphrased for children's attention spans and ears, much like you'd tell the story to a Sunday school class. The only noticeable deficiency that I noticed in this component of the program was that the music which accompanied each page would abruptly stop at the end of the narration. This sounded very awkward and was quite noticeable when my niece and I were trying to enjoy the stories and look at the pictures before turning the page. The music would start again as soon as the page was turned, but it just seemed very odd for it to all of a sudden cut off as soon as the narrator was finished with the page. Maybe a little fade out or something would be nice...?
The Play component was fun, but lacked any... substance. I guess you can't really expect much substance from a kids' program like this, but I would have liked to see some games that helped to enforce the Bible story or the biblical principle.
Instead, there was a colouring book activity that allowed the kids to colour in an activity page. It also had a neat function where you could push a palette icon and it would paint in the right colours wherever you touched so that younger users would be able to create a pretty picture without less skill.
There was also a puzzle game, which was my niece's favourite.
And then there was this weird apple shooting game with Eve and the Serpent... it was my favourite game to play... but it took Ella and I awhile to figure out what we were supposed to do and how. Some written instruction or even a visual demonstration at the start of the game would have been helpful (instead of the single diagram...which did not seem self-explanatory to me...)
All in all I thought it was a fun little app. Ella was even able to e-mail me a picture of what she'd coloured in the Bible Activity page and that was super cute. But I would never buy this app. It simply doesn't have enough functionality or substance to it to make it worth purchasing, no matter what the price was. Ella and I managed to get all the use one could possibly get out of this app after two 10 minute sessions together, and that just isn't enough usefulness to justify a price or the space it would be taking up on the iPad.
It was fun, but I think it could use some work.
See more info on this app here:
Beginner's Bible App
