Application Review: Kid Mode

https://market.android.com/kidmode

http://www.amazon.com/Zoodles-Kid-Mode-Play-Learn

The Kid Mode app is a must-have for parents who let their children play with their phones or tablets on a regular basis. This application offers parents an easy way to control the content, games, and other applications their children will use/see while playing with a smartphone or tablet. The free version of this app comes with games, art, books, mail, and favorites tabs that children can browse through. These tabs each provide a variety of fun activities for children to browse through.

When you first start using the app it asks you to make little profiles for your children that include their names, a photo, and their ages, so that the app can customize its content to your children's age groups. This app also requires that you create an account with them. This account seems to be mainly used for relaying messages and updates about your children's activity on the Kid Mode app. The messages and updates are actually very informative too because the developer tracks what games/videos/activities your child chooses to play with and categorizes them based on time spent with the activity and they type of activity (math, cognitive, creative, etcetera). It also sends specific request for books that your children wanted to read on the app.

Within the activity tabs, the games tab has pre-loaded games and videos that are educational. It also lets parents add specific apps like "Angry Birds" or other games to the list available to children. The art tab provides a simple paint-type program for kids to draw with and it uploads those pictures onto the parent's account so that they can save and share their children's artwork. The books tab comes with one free story book and others that are available for purchase at a relatively low price. The other books also become active if you choose to pay for a premium membership. The story books have a fun feature which lets parents record a reading of each book on the Zoodles website that can then be downloaded onto the app for kids to listen to and watch.

The mail tab can be activated in the parental controls and personalized on the Zoodles website. It allows parents to set up a list of relatives or friends for the child to contact. Children can then send and receive short video messages to and from their contacts. The favorites tab calculates which activities the child spends most of his/her time interacting with and then puts them in one place for easy access. There are also helpful recorded voice instructions throughout some of the features.

One problem that I encountered with the application was that it seemed very easy to get out of it. To exit the app, it only required a double-tap of the back button or drawing a "Z" on the screen. The application is designed for children who are under 8 years old, but I could see many kids over the age of two being able to either accidentally or purposely exit the application easily. There might be stronger controls through the premium membership, however.

There is an abundance of free content in the games, videos, art, and mail portions of this application. This is really helpful because it can be difficult to find 100% child-friendly content on the internet sometimes. But, the books and some stronger parental controls are seriously lacking in the version. It seems that most of those issues can be remedied by purchasing a premium membership. The premium membership offers quite a few more features and can be bought with a monthly, bi-annual, or annual fee. More information regarding this membership can be found at http://www.zoodles.com/

Overall, the "Kid Mode" application offers a great way to monitor younger children's technologic activities for free, as well as providing an abundance of educational videos and games that are age appropriate in one place. This app is great for any parent with kids who like to play on computers, smartphones, or tablets. The premium membership should be looked into by anyone who enjoys the free version of this application.

This app is very child-friendly for obvious reasons and it comes with voice directions for navigating many of its features. It is also simple for parents to control the settings in the parental mode within the application and on the Zoodles website.

The free version of this app provides a great number of useful functions without having to pay for anything. The premium membership fees are also pretty reasonable for the amount of extra content, control, and features that it gives to the Kid Mode application.