This is a love letter to the AR app My Hungry Caterpillar.
Dear My Hungry Caterpillar,
You are going to be a delight for my future kids (or an app that’s like it)… Might not have kids for a while… But your app is really fun and gets kids thinking about games in a new way.
Augmented reality games like this, I believe, will be the bridge between the ipad kids and the next generation of critical learners. This experience has you grow a caterpillar from start to butterfly. You are placed in each others worlds to adventure, play, and most importantly learn lessons about how to care for nature. These skills can be applied to raising and caring for a pet, and teaches responsibility to younger audiences.
I tried the game out for all of about 30 minutes and learned that this game is pretty cute and gives you an expansive experience.
One thing I thought the app did well was track the environment. The caterpillar was able to sense when things became available to it. Such as bringing out the toys and the bubble machine. Even though I brought out all the toys at once it knew only to interact with the most recent toy that I activated. The bubble machine was fun to play with and when I touched the apples from the tree and made them fall it knew to go eat.
I also thought this app taught a good lesson about caring for nature, skills which could easily translate to taking care of other things around you like pets, your siblings, your mom’s flower garden, etc. With a trackable progress of the caterpillar getting bigger the better you treat it, you give the user a sense of improvement and care.
It wasn’t a perfect app though. I wish there were more sounds! One thing I know would get users more engaged is a wider sound design. There weren’t many sounds that gave us queues on what we were doing was right. They kind of just place you in there and it’s somewhat of a soundless visual experience. Users would feel see and hear the environment, creating a more augmented and holistic experience. I would be more convinced that I am operating in the app’s world if I had more sounds to draw me in.
Another thing I would change would be to add more text or graphic queues that mark progress. From beginning to end of my experience there weren’t many text queues that told me I was doing the right thing. Maybe a level system or some sort of queue that says “great job, the caterpillar is growing, keep feeding and see what happens”. Something to draw me in and show me I’m using the app right. They kind of just place you in the environment with the caterpillar and let you do your thing. I think you can hammer home the learning aspects with more progress graphics and texts that pop up as you complete your journey.
Overall this is a cute app with fun implications on learning and caring for your world. I think the idea of this app is something I could see my kids using and would love to guide them through an experience like this in the future.
Here is a clip from my experience (excuse the crowded living room)