Lots of Information, Not Much Interactivity

What We Liked:

This app contains quite a wide range of life cycle (and cycles in science in general) topics. The information is solid, and is often very detailed. With 10 cycles presented in detail along with illustrations, this app is a solid value at $0.99, particularly for children who need additional audio-visual reinforcement of the science topics they are studying.

The illustrations for each cycle clearly show the progression through the cycle from stage to stage and are generally detailed enough to get the main ideas across. There are easy to access options to turn audio on and off and to turn the display the detailed text for each stage of the cycle on and off as well. I like this flexibility because it allows you to completely ‘silence’ the app and do the teaching yourself, to just look at the app with the audio on, to turn the audio and text on and have your child read along (good for learning to read those tricky scientific terms), or to turn the audio off and have your child read the text themselves.

What We Didn’t Like:

A Life Cycle app is pretty basic, and as such, doesn’t really take full advantage of the interactive format. The life cycles need to be gone through in order, the app doesn’t allow you to tap on different points in the life cycle to learn about them, so you can get stuck cycling around and around until you get to the section you want to focus in on.

None of the points in the cycles pop up or zoom in on that part of the cycle illustration when they are tapped – I think there is a lot of potential to really hone in on the illustration of that part of the cycle, and even to provide additional visuals. The Phases of the Moon page in particular is hard to understand without further visual details (like showing the position of the sun, moon, and earth in relationship to each other in each moon phase, instead of just showing the moon’s shape as seen from earth.)

These two main points make the app more like an old-school visual projector presentation than like most interactive apps, the information is taught, but you’re sort of stuck in lock-step with the presentation.

Overall:

A Life Cycle App is a good, solid, information-based app that covers science cycle topics typically taught from elementary all the way to high school. It may not be flashy, but its easy to pull out for direct teaching and visual reinforcement of life cycle concepts.

I received a promo code to download this app.

Appsforhomeschooling.com about A Life Cycle App, v1.0.2