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 We had/have high hopes for this app – especially after patiently waiting for it to download (all 1.5GB of it) – because we LOVE Barefoot books (isn’t it lovely when a publisher takes illustration seriously?). So here’s the scoop – it is lovely, and the art makes you want to play with it. Just moving Earth around and taking a look at all the different countries, seeing their highest peaks, capitals, flags, etc is great. What is a bit random is the other information…numbers of cars per 1000 people, CO2 emissions and the “medal table 2012″ – presumably from the London Olympics. While we found it cool to see which six (yep 6) countries have greater average CO2 emissions per head per year than the United States, it doesn’t provide any context for understanding what CO2 emissions means. And if you do care about Olympic medals, what about showing the sports in which they were won. We hope that in an upcoming update that there will be much more background information included. One fun thing is that you can allow your location (in your settings) and then see how far away each country is from you – note it calculates from the capital city of each country. In all, if you have the space, this app is quite interesting and fun to use. Your child/student could easily glean a great deal of geography. We eagerly await an upgrade.
Skills: geography, country capitals, flags, major landmarks
Cost: $4.99
Platform: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad (but note it is HUGE 1.5GB – we recommend only using on an iPad)
Grade(s): 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade
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