My Kid Reviews Your iPad App: Miss Spider’s Tea Party
Miss Spider’s Tea Party is an iPad app based on the popular children’s book of the same name. It is a beautifully designed piece of software – with rich imagery, vibrant colors, and all the great illustrations from the book series.
Miss Spider's Tea Party iPad App
The app is five/six apps in one, giving kids lots of activities to choose from. The first feature is the animated story book, which allows the reader to page through illustrated scenes with an optional audio track and interactive elements on each page. In addition to the story, there is a full video for kids to watch a featuring the Miss Spider characters. There are games, too, including a match game, finger painting, and a handful of puzzles for kids to put together.
They’ve done a great job bringing a lot of functionality to this app and making it look great, but enough up my yapping. Let’s see what the kid says:
Any parent can tell you that silence is golden. She’s a big fan of this app, and loves almost every feature. It’s almost like five or six independent apps that could stand on their own, but all combined as one that has a cohesive feel.
WHAT’S GREAT:
Great user interface, imagery, and story. The video is high quality, not a last minute port to the iPad. The games are solid – no bugs to be found (no pun intended.) This really feels like the future of kid’s books – story, video, and games all inline with the same story line.
WHAT CAN BE BETTER:
Levels of Difficulty: Both the match game and puzzle could really benefit from additional skill levels for younger/older kids. You can see from the video how quickly my kid gets bored with the puzzle feature.
Alternative User Interface for New Drawings: My experience shows that shaking the iPad is not as natural as the iPhone, in fact it feels pretty silly to do it at all. If they choose to keep that feature for older kids, they should at least have a secondary interface option via button press. Every time my kid shakes the iPad, I can just picture it flying across the room.
So – takeaway is that is is a great app. It’s $9.99 in the iTunes store, and definitely worth it for your kids.
*Disclaimer: this app was provided free of charge for this review
