Parents' Guide to Wreck This App

The genius behind WRECK THIS APP lies in the way it allows kids to feel subversive but is really teaching them ways to harness their own creativity. Whether a child is suffering from a youthful writer's block or is just plain bored, her imagination can easily be sparked by the chance to drip ink all over a page or scribble a mustache and eyepatch onto a hated photo of herself. The scrawling, smearing messiness of the activities here feel uniquely different from those found in more traditional creativity journals. This being an app (in which anything you do is inherently temporary), there may be somewhat less of a visceral thrill than you'd get from defacing the pages of an actual paper book -- but the app factor has its upsides, too, as in the ability to upload photos and share copies of the messy art you make.