This is a view of the augmented reality app “My Very Hungry Caterpillar AR” for iPhone and iPad.
This app is based on the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, and it’s targeted at preschool kids (and their parents). In the app, the player sees everything happen in their own environment, which should be a flat surface such as a table, carpet, or the ground. They can hatch a caterpillar from an egg, play with the caterpillar by painting, blowing bubbles, and bringing out toys
Feed the caterpillar fruits
Put the caterpillar to sleep at night
And help the caterpillar to grow into a beautiful butterfly. After the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the game starts over with all of the same options.
To test this app out, I tried it out in two different environments, and I had my kids try it. The app has many things that are very well done. Most importantly, the kids loved it; they squealed, were charmed, and fought over who got to touch the screen. They thought that the caterpillar was very cute and especially loved feeding him fruits, discovering what the fruit would be each “day” (Fruits change based on fruits in the real book each time the caterpillar wakes up.), and painting with the paintbrush. There were plenty of different activities to try to be fun for the duration of the game. The kids were also able to figure out how to use the app very intuitively, and it was perfect for a young preschool age level because it included simple steps and no need for reading to complete the activities.
The app also has gorgeous graphics that really honor the visual spirit of the book, and the visuals stayed bright and beautiful and reasonably realistic in multiple different environments.
Several factors could be improved about the app as well. First (and most importantly, ha!), the icon for the app shows a caterpillar with a cupcake, but there is NO CUPCAKE anywhere during the game! This is very disappointing for a preschooler!
More importantly for parents, the game is marketed in the App Store as educational and states “develops nurturing skills and a love of nature.” I am not convinced that the game really does this. It is true that the caterpillar turns from an egg to a caterpillar, then makes a cocoon and comes out as a butterfly, but it doesn’t make a point to teach this, and there doesn’t seem to be any actual content beyond that. It also just might be encouraging love of technology just a wee bit more than love of nature. That being said, the app itself seems fun and entertaining as a game, and these are really more problems with marketing than with the app itself.
Within the app, there are a couple of functionalities that could be improved – mainly the ability to put away the “toys” that the caterpillar plays with. Once you bring out a toy, you can play with the caterpillar for a little while, but then it is hard to put the toy back in the toybox or set it down on the table. This wasn’t a huge problem, but slightly distracting.
Another minor problem with the app is that it’s clearly been designed to hold in your hand, but when playing on a large iPad, it would be much nicer to let the iPad rest on its stand while playing. Unfortunately, this angle wasn’t designed for, which means that many things happening with the caterpillar are off-screen when it’s resting upright, so I propped the iPad up with a block to get a better angle.
One other thing that I noted about the app is that game play is relatively short. You can make the caterpillar into a butterfly in just 10 minutes, and then the game repeats with nothing new to offer. This made the game boring for me as an adult, but the kids didn’t seem to mind and weren’t bothered by playing the same game over and over again. It is difficult to tell if this is truly an area for improvement or if it’s just fine as an age-appropriate “feature.”
Finally, although the AR features looked very nice and worked quite well, they didn’t seem to offer any added value to the game play. I’m not even sure that my kids noticed that the background of the game was our actual kitchen table, and they definitely didn’t seem to care. The caterpillar didn’t interact with the environment other than crawling across the floor, so the main purpose of the AR was really just to create a backdrop for the scene. I noticed that the same game developer has another app based on Eric Carle books that is not AR and includes content from several books, actual educational activities such as counting, alphabet, and numerous more activities, so I’m not sure that the AR feature is providing anything particularly useful here.
Despite a few criticisms, I felt that the app was successful overall primarily because the kids were able to use it easily and they really liked it. It really feels like perhaps this app is a bit of a prototype, as if perhaps the developer created it to see if they were able to create a small simple project that would be viable in the AR scope, so that they could see if it would be marketable and feasible to produce a bigger project later on down the road.