Creature Garden by Tinybop
By Dana Anderson,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Create cool, fantastical animals and test their abilities.
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Creature Garden by Tinybop
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What’s It About?
To play CREATURE GARDEN BY TINYBOP, first choose an icon for your account and enter your name. Next, choose an egg. Whatever hatches is your animal's body. Next choose from legs, wings, tails, heads, eyes, mouths, and accessories. Line up the body parts with the red dots to fit in the correct spots; the dots will turn blue when they're placed correctly. After you decorate your land with trees, flowers, rocks, and more, you can move your animals around or make more. Tap on the golden bunny to enter the racecourse. Choose up to four animals to race, set obstacles, or make animals faster or slower. See who wins!
Is It Any Good?
This visually beautiful app taps into two things that most kids love: animals and making new creations. Creature Garden by Tinybop includes more than 100 animal parts for kids to combine in thousands of ways to make their own animals. Kids can build virtually any animal they can imagine and learn about animal characteristics in the process. How about a hippo-flamingo-shark? Can a lizard-parrot-turtle fly? In addition to playing with the creative features on this app, racing animals and throwing in some obstacles is just plain fun and lets kids test different features. The breeding station is less creative than the app's other options -- it essentially just sticks two animals together -- but there are plenty of opportunities for kids to design, develop a narrative, and test their creations.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the mechanics and biology behind your child's animals' abilities in Creature Garden by Tinybop. What is it about wings that allow animals to fly? Why don't all animals with wings fly? How do fins help animals swim? Does it matter where the fins are placed on the animal's body?
Talk about your child's creative choices and help them engage in a discussion about explaining their choices. Ask them lots of questions about why they chose what they chose for each animal and for the garden. This can help develop their critical-thinking skills, understanding of part-whole relationships, and self-reflection.
Just for fun, participate in one of the animal races with your kid. Each of you choose an animal and see who's faster!
App Details
- Devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
- Subjects: Science: animals
- Skills: Thinking & Reasoning: part-whole relationships, Creativity: imagination, making new creations
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Release date: June 18, 2017
- Category: Education
- Topics: Wild Animals
- Publisher: Tinybop
- Version: 1.0.1
- Minimum software requirements: iOS 7.0 or later
- Last updated: February 13, 2020
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