IPad app: Barefoot World Atlas

New app this week just released in the iTunes app store, Barefoot World Atlas might seem steep at $10(NZ)+ – but if you don’t own a globe, and have children, this might be just the thing (that’s what I told myself anyway 😉

Key features include:

• Ambient music
• Full spinning 3D globe with animated sequences in each country
• Famous sites, flora, fauna and indigenous people, with audio and photographs to illustrate the different countries

How might it be used for learning?

• Social studies – Geography – locating places, engaging students in consideration of different key features of countries, key economics of each area
• Social studies – consideration of different people’s and their histories
• Maths – latitude, longitude, distance etc are detailed for each country

It would be neat to be able to add photos/ information to the globe, tailoring it to your own interests (although that, I guess, is Google maps;-) – but even without that, my children were able to quickly locate places they knew, and the engaging graphics pulled them into new countries so they learned a few new ideas.

My 7 year old said:

“I liked that you could turn the globe, and you could press things and then the man would speak about them and then you touch the button and you could see a real picture of it. My favourite things on the globe were killer whales and penguins because the penguins are cute
and the whales have different colours. One thing I learned was that killer whales work as a team to get their food.

“It’s better than a globe because the globe that we just saw has extra things about the world that you can look at.”

My 5 year old said:

“I liked it when we pressed the button and then the real life comes out. I saw the real scorpion in Africa. I learned they are not in our country. And penguins live in a different icy pace and bugs live in sand, like scorpions.”

Ten minutes after this, reading a bedtime story, she spotted the Eiffel Tower, seen for the first time on the Barefoot World Atlas, and correctly identified it.