Common Sense Media Review
By Leslie Crenna
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Fun coloring, tracing, and drawing practice for young kids.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 5+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Download
Videos and Photos
PicsArt for Kids
What's It About?
The main menu offers three modes -- Draw, Color, and Learn -- plus a gallery for displaying work. Kids select a background in Draw mode, then select colors or Dice mode, which adds various effects and options randomly. Color mode offers semi-stereotypical coloring-page themes, including animals, transportation, monsters, and princesses. Learn mode offers mazes and dotted-line scenes for tracing practice as well as open-ended, shape-based drawing lessons. Kids can tap to erase, delete, or save finished art to the gallery.
Is It Any Good?
PICSART FOR KIDS is a decent drawing app for kids that adds a few unique educational activities: tracing, finish-the-drawing, and open-ended, shape-based drawing lessons. Tracing is a vital prewriting skill that is often overlooked in traditional mass-market products, so it's awesome that your kids can get some practice here. The shape-based drawing activity offers up a page showing the shape (a teardrop, for instance) and two simple line drawings that include it. Kids can trace over the shape to recreate the line drawings or start from scratch to make their own.
Unfortunately, the app only offers a handful of tracing activities (mazes don't really count) and only a few more single-page drawing lessons and finish-the-drawing pages. In some of the free versions, bottom banner ads often get in the way of seeing all the content (in the case of the mazes, it's vital content). In Android versions, kids have to use the back button to leave page layers (and four layers is too many for younger kids), and kids are prompted to exit to leave modes. Although older kids will get used to this relatively quickly, younger ones might get frustrated and need some guidance.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
For prewriters, offer more tracing activities like finger painting.
Model color mixing with paints; for example, red and blue make purple!
Check out line-drawing activity books from the library.
App Details
- Devices : iPhone , iPod Touch , iPad , Android , Kindle Fire
- Subjects : Arts : drawing , Language & Reading : writing
- Skills : Tech Skills : digital creation , Health & Fitness : fine motor skills , Creativity : imagination , producing new content , Thinking & Reasoning : part-whole relationships
- Pricing structure : Paid, Free
- Release date : March 31, 2013
- Genre : Education
- Publisher : PicsArt
- Version : Android 1.3.0; iOS 1.0.0
- Minimum software requirements : Android 2.1 and up; iOS 5.0 or later
- Last updated : November 11, 2020
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