SymbolSmash is a sweet iPad arcade game to teach kids all about classical music
There’s a growing arsenal of apps aimed squarely at children, as parents increasingly turn to technology to entertain, amuse and educate their young ‘uns.
Indeed, while Visua Musio is a lovely iPad app that lets kids make experimental songs with shapes, another little nugget has hit our radar, designed to teach young kids all about classical music.
SymbolSmash for iPad sells itself as a series of Warioware-style arcade games for youngsters, aimed at 6-9 year-olds. It encourages familiarisation with symbols and instruments from specific pieces of classical music.
How it works
First things first, SymbolSmash is a beautifully designed app – it’s colorful, lively and engaging which, frankly, it has to be for the intended audience.
Set to Jacques Offenbach’s Voyage to the Moon, SymbolSmash’s first module takes each kid through a series of musical games, introducing them to the instruments and symbols through a piece of music. The interactive play section lets kids discover the key components of musical composition, and there are six games for kids to play: Find the Instrument, Catch the Symbols, Dot-to-Dot, Memory Pairs, Question Time and Hit the Cards.
Players can experiment with the sounds of various instruments from the orchestra, set against pretty impressive animations, and they’re encouraged to identify instruments and learn the relevant terminology.
While Voyage to the Moon is the only current module, a series of in-app purchases will let kids access additional modules, with The Liberty Bell March (AKA The Monty Python theme tune) “Coming Soon”.
The app is optimized for second Generation iPads, with first generation versions’ memory limitations meaning that animations will be displayed as stills.
So, if you’re comfortable handing your iPad to your kids to keep them amused, then SymbolSmash could be a good addition to your armory of apps. It’s available to download now from the Apple App Store for $2.99, or your local currency equivalent.
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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Explore this collection of 200+ free humanitarian icons created by the United Nations
It was love at first sight when I discovered the Noun Project, a massive catalog of beautiful, public-domain pictographs. Since then, the project just keeps growing and now a collection of 200+ humanitarian symbols has been donated by the United Nations and is completely free for anyone to use.
Everything on the Noun Project is in the public domain, which allows for all of the pictographs/symbols/icons to be used and remixed for any purpose. If you’re curious as to how you could actually take advantage of this collection, you’ll notice that some of the symbols are more likely to be useful than others, like the computer, email, camera or map marker.
This collection of pictographs is well designed that it translates in simple black and white. It lacks the shine, depth and texture you’d want in an iOS or Android icon, but that’s why these are more starting points — if you’re interested in tapping into the Noun Project for that purpose.
Beyond actually taking advantage of what’s now available, it’s important to see that these designs also serve as great inspiration for icon and logo design — if only because they’re examples of how to distil a complex object or idea down to its simplest form.
Check out all of the icons via the link below:
See original here: Explore this collection of 200+ free humanitarian icons created by the United Nations
Study: Those Social Media Logos On TV Actually Work
There is hardly a program or ad on TV these days that doesn’t ask its viewers to like its Facebook page or tweet about it. According to a new survey by global consulting firm Accenture, there’s a simple reason for this: those social media symbols actually work. Accenture found that, in the U.S, about a third of TV viewers have liked a show’s or brand’s Facebook page or tweeted about what they saw on TV after seeing one of these logos.
The most common action for those who did interact with a show or ad while watching TV was liking its page on Facebook (20%). About 7% of viewers searched for a show’s hashtag on Twitter and 5% used Shazam while sitting on their couch.
Surprisingly, the survey also found that 11% of viewers scanned a QR code while watching TV. That’s a rather large number, given that QR codes are still far from mainstream.
Why do people interact with these shows and brands on social media? It’s not so much because they want to be social, but because they want to get coupons (32%) and enter sweepstakes (26%). Only a fifth of respondents also said that they interacted with the logos to “connect with others with similar interests” and to recommend a video or program to others.
For the most part, those who then received content via these social media symbols were quite happy with what they found. Only 10% of respondents said that their expectations were not met and 15% said that what they found exceeded their expectations.
See original here: Study: Those Social Media Logos On TV Actually Work