PlayScience – Review – Learning and teaching science can be lots of fun

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By: APPKONG

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2011-11-23

Developer: APPKONG

Price: 1.99

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Learning doesn’t have to be boring, and teaching kids doesn’t have to be exhausting, either. With the variety of tools at our disposal in this age of rapidly evolving technology, we can easily make learning and teaching a fun pair. Especially when equipped with an iPhone, learners and teachers alike can work in “magical” ways to make their respective tasks less boring and less exhausting.

A good example of how the iPhone can significantly contribute to the sphere of pedagogy is PlayScience. It’s an iPhone app that, as its name suggests, combines scientific concepts with playful activities. It smartly takes advantage of the device’s external hardware-dependent interface mechanisms in presenting a number of basic scientific ideas through different interactive twists.

PlayScience is geared primarily toward teaching preschoolers, so the scientific principles included in the app are just basic ones. Included are basic principles categorized into five major scientific concepts, namely, temperature, sound, inertia and gravity, light, and electricity. True to the app’s name, each category comprises introductions to physical laws that entail some sort of fun activity involving the iPhone itself to help kids better understand how the physical world works. And, of course, the app uses colorful cartoon art all throughout to further entice young learners. Every page in the app is also accompanied by a short explanation of the principle on hand read aloud by a soft female voice. It’s far from being obstructive–it’s instructive, in fact–but this read-to-me feature can be turned off if so desired.

Let’s take one example from each of the five categories to illustrate the all-important fun factor of PlayScience. Under Temperature, a chubby king is feeling quite chilly. Beside him is a thermometer, which indicates that his body temperature is well below normal. Kids are then tasked to rub their fingers against the king to make him warm and restore his normal body temperature. Under Sound, kids can learn about sound intensity by singing softly into the iPhone’s built-in microphone to lull a baby to sleep, all the while avoiding making loud noises so as not to wake the baby. Under Inertia and Gravity, the slightly more advanced concept of inertia is introduced through the alternate tapping of the acceleration and brake pedals of a bus, wherein the passengers accordingly jerk forward and backward. Within the Light category, secondary colors are created when any two of the three primary colors are activated by tapping on them. And finally, for Electricity, kids are instructed to tilt the device sideways in order to make waves for the generation of tidal power.

The Temperature category consists of five pages of principles and their corresponding mini-activities, while each of the other categories includes four. This seems an odd distribution, but if you combine one of the pages under Temperature that is actually about the chubby king feeling hot with that about him feeling cold, then the distribution across all categories becomes even. The prospect of adding more concepts with furture app updates is not to be ruled out, so at a couple of bucks, PlayScience is a nice investment that counts toward turning science from mere study to engaging play.