Children love making up monsters. As, let’s be honest, do many parents. Or is it just us who regularly scribble the scariest beast we can for the amusement of our kids?
The Monsters by Tinybop takes that idea to iPhone and iPad. It’s the work of Tinybop, the American company that is one of the most inventive children’s app developers around at the moment.
This is the third in the company’s “Digital Toys” series, following the excellent The Robot Factory and The Everything Machine, which both came out in 2015.
The Monsters is an accessible monster-maker, where children create their beasts with eyes, scales, horns, fur, mouths, feathers and all kinds of patterns, then make them speak by recording their own voices.
“Make the monsters of your nightmares or the monsters your dreams. Turn shadows into wretched beasts with gloomy eyes that gleam. Make belching beasts with lots of teeth. Crying ogres with grotesque feet,” explains the App Store listing, suitably gleefully.
“Make farting fiends with gnashing maws, unfortunate horrors with feathered paws. Make monsters scared of everything good. Make monsters hiding in the woods. Make all the monsters you can imagine.”
There’s plenty of variety once children start investigating the different shapes and parts: it’s possible to build a monster with real character. We love the audio recording aspect too: silent monsters on a screen is all well and good, but making them roar is great fun.
The Monsters by Tinybop costs £2.29 for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store.
• Read about more Tinybop apps for kids on Apps Playground