Sarah Faisal and Nicole Seymour from award-winning children’s production company Animal Tech select their pick of the best apps to expand your little one’s mind and help make learning fun.

This week’s app: Toca Tailor from Toca Boca

Age: 3-5

Focus: Open-ended creative play

 

Summary

If you haven’t heard of Toca Boca, then check them out. All their apps are simply wonderful. Their slogan says it all – The Power of Play –  with a focus on child-led exploration and open-ended experimentation. And the claim that their apps are not games but digital toys is accurate. In Toca Tailor, children get to style fun outfits for four different funny characters. Your child will choose between loads of clothing designs and accessories, and then fit them like a real tailor.

 

Why we love it 

• Firstly, the characters to choose from are such fun! And they even interact with the child as they are dressing them up – giggle when the child places a funny article of clothing on to them, yawn if the child is taking too long to make a choice.
• So many lovely and funky choices of clothing and accessories allows for endless play and combinations.  Our resident four-year-old tester, Basma, loves to take pictures of different patterns around the house, or of her favourite characters and toys, to use as actual patterns that she can then apply to the clothing materials back in the app.
• The actual interactions – the selection, the placing and the manipulation of the clothing assets – is easy, fun, fluid and most importantly age-appropriate. The child never gets stuck in any of the interactions and intuitively knows what to do.
• You can access your photos and import them into the designs. We had loads of fun importing photos of a family cat which could then be used as a pattern on a character’s dress.
• You can even take a snapshot of your child’s creation which then gets saved to your library.

 

Link to the App Store: apps.apple.com

 

AND if your little ones are loving this app as we predict, there is also:

Toca Tailor Fairy Tales: apps.apple.com

 

DON’T MISS

– App of the week: Dr. Panda Town Collection
– App of the week: Hungry Caterpillar Play School
– App of the week: Osmo Little Genius

 

About the authors

Sarah Faisal and Nicole Seymour are from award-winning children’s production company, Anamil Tech. Sarah, founder and MD of Anamil Tech, and with a PhD in Human Computer Interaction, is passionate about using media and technology to make learning fun and expand children’s knowledge of the world around them. Nicole Seymour, creative director of Anamil Tech, has been creating and producing digital content for young children for over 20 years for companies such as CBeebies, Disney, Lego Media and Scholastic.

 

Anamil Tech

Founded in 2015, Anamil Tech develops multilingual learning apps and videos to grow young children’s minds. Its flagship brand, Pacca Alpaca, is now being developed into a children’s TV show, which Sarah and Nicole are producing, alongside an animated TV show intended for family audiences in the Middle East.