One of the things that I like to do in our home is to create multiple points of contact with scripture in our day. This means that, even if we miss one of the regular places where the kids and I typically interact with the Word, it really has to be an off day before we make it all the way through without any scripture at all. While this is a very minor point of contact, it's still contact, and it's fun. My kids think it's great. The puzzles are cute. They only come in one size, which is big enough to be fun, but small enough to do in just a couple of minutes and then be done. There's a free puzzle every day, and you can spend coins in order to do past puzzles. The daily puzzles are organized into a puzzle calendar that you slowly assemble as you complete them, which is kind of fun. It also makes it really easy to see which ones you've done, and which are still waiting.
There's a couple of tools that you can use to help you get your puzzle done; most of them do cost a couple of coins. You can earn coins, (very) slowly, in the gameplay, or you can buy coins with real money, or you can earn coins by watching short commercials; the ones I saw were for other game apps. Unfortunately, as you use the coins, there's no warning messages or anything: they're just gone. Which is how my six-year old used up about 350 coins in a half hour or so the first day that I had the app... without him ever even realizing that they exist, much less that he was using them. So if you buy coins, do be aware to teach your children how they get used, and when they can do it: I would have been very frustrated, had that been $30 of coins that I'd bought, rather than just coins that I was given for the review! In addition to the other features, you can also log in through Facebook and play with friends, which could be a fun feature if you enjoy playing that way.
The pictures used in the puzzles are uniformly lovely. I'm not sure what version of the Bible they're using, besides that it's not the King James, but the verses they picked for all the puzzles that we did are uplifting and encouraging. However, you don't build a gallery of completed puzzles or anything like that, so you see the verses once and then they're gone, which limits the usefulness of the app as a tool to gently increase your familiarity, or an aid to "ponderizing" your scriptures, or anything like that. It's a nice puzzle app, but I think that the scripture to game balance is too far to the game side of thing for this to be a meaningful addition to study. However, it could be a fun way to get a gentle exposure as you play the puzzles, especially if you're good at puzzles; I'm pretty slow, so it's probably 15-20 minutes to complete one, unless I use some coins. Used mindfully, the app could possibly be a way to find new verses to study or memorize, but it lacks that kind of tools to do it in the app.
Hero(10) had this to say about it: "I just think it's great."
Dragon(6) said: "I love it! It challenges my brain."
To read more reviews on this app, and to see how other families used it in their homeschool, please click the link below:
1 comment:
I never thought about longevity of verses... and having a gallery of verses/pictures completed would be a lovely addition wouldn't it?
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