Children love to draw, their exploration and expression of art starts with a scribble, followed by lines and curves, stick figures and scenes. Making Art gives them a medium to express their thoughts and emotions, helps them learn how to stay focussed on a single activity and stimulates their right brain. At Sprite Kids we want to encourage and empower children to be creative. Mini Monet Creative Studio and Art Club for Kids, gives children a creative environment to express their art and pushes the boundaries even further by providing them a platform to: participate in challenges that spark creativity, share their art work in an art club, where other kids can appreciate their work and learn by observation.
Mini Monet is safe creative playground for kids. Children participate in Weekly Challenges and can share their mini master pieces in the Mini Monet Art Club. Designed & developed for kids, the “Magic Pencil” in Mini Monet prevents color from spilling outside the lines in hand drawn areas, making it easier for them to color in between the lines, enhancing the fun and helping them create beautiful art. Here is a video of an impromptu creative testing session with a 5 year old user, she was so excited when she could color neatly inside the lines: Mini Monet Creative Testing – Little Girl happy that she could color neatly.
Mini Monet Challenges are created for the kids and have a little something for every child, for the younger kids there are creative elements in the drawing to color and additional elements which can be traced and added to the challenge. For the older kids they can tap their own creativity to complete the challenge. Challenge themed stickers are downloaded with each new challenge, these instill further creativity. The challenges provide endless creativity for the children, there is a new challenge every week!
“Is it a safe environment for my kids?”, asked some of our Parent testers. “Yes, it is” is our response. Children’s privacy is very important to Sprite Kids and strict privacy control is ingrained in the app, from the day of inception. Children’s Online Privacy has been a priority since day one of design and development on this app. The app does not share the child’s identity online, children cannot communicate with each other – the app does not allow texting or commenting on art work. Sometimes we see children’s art posted in public libraries ( posted by local art schools) or published in popular kids magazines, which disclose information such as name, age and location of the child. Mini Monet takes children’s privacy a step further and displays only the child’s artwork. The child’s identity is protected in every way possible, children cannot form a network here, they cannot follow other kids. What they see and share is their Art. Our team is vigilant and filters out inappropriate art work. The image below shows what the Art Club looks like in the App, it can only inspire creativity.
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has researched several existing Social Networking Forums in their insightful and informative publication “Kids Online: A new research agenda for social networking forums” http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/jgcc_kidsonline.pdf it mentions that “Emerging Social Network Forums that sponsor sharing creative designs may provide unique opportunities for children to develop (these kind of) new social literacies and skills”. This research also defines a new classification system for examining social network forums and their features related to the forms of communication they enable, the personal profile they allow users to create, the networking residues they encourage, and the hierarchies of access they afford. This classification is effective in showing the capabilities and limitations of these networks. Classifying Mini Monet along the lines of this research would look something like this :
Mini Monet is a safe environment for children to create, share and learn art.
The app makes it fun for users to engage in creative drawing. Children earn coins as they use the app and appreciate the work of others, these can be used to earn creative elements from the Art Store in the app. Children have state of the art drawing tools for capturing their ideas. For the younger artists there are innumerable pages to color, when they color a little view on the top left shows how other kids have colored the same page, what a fun way to learn from the work of others!
For the creative ones there are blank pages to capture their creativity. The symmetry pages reinforce the concept of symmetry :
We want to provide budding little artists with endless creativity with Mini Monet.
Mini Monet Creative Studio & Art Club for Kid was featured in the Best for ages 6-8 category in the iTunes App Store in UK when it was released. It is available for the iPad in the iTunes App Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mini-monet-creative-studio/id767561903?mt=8
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