Dancing is one of life’s great pleasures: albeit less so for anyone having to watch when I get my arms and legs flailing on the dancefloor. Occasionally in time to the music.
Thankfully, I’m more than capable of some expert rug-cutting in Toca Boca’s new app Toca Dance – although your children will likely be even better.
Released for iPhone and iPad, it’s an inventive musical app that gets kids choreographing their own three-person dance troupe before watching their moves on-stage.
You start by choosing three of the eight characters, who like those in other Toca Boca apps, are quirky and colourful – but also, importantly, a good mix of genders and races.
Next, you choose outfits for them, before moving to the rehearsal studio, where you choose one of five songs for them to dance to.
ElektronikDJ is perfect for robot moves; Olga is upbeat dance-pop; Sweet Lemonade is a catchy pop song; Minnah Bee sounds like cutesy Japanese pop; and Let’s Go is dubstep (no, really).
Getting them to dance is simply a case of putting your finger on the screen and moving the main dancer’s arms, head or body: you can make them jump, shake their heads, waggle their arms and any combination of them all.
It’s a bit like manipulating rag-dolls. Each song has six phases, represented by coloured dots at the top of the screen: if you decide you don’t like a move, you simply re-do it.
Once finished, your trio is ready for the stage, where you watch them perform the whole routine – while using buttons at the bottom of the screen to set off special effects, change the size of the dancers’ bodies and heads, and even lob supportive roses, sweets and, er, shoes at them.
There’s an option to save the finished performance to your camera roll as a video – which I suspect means there’ll be plenty popping up on YouTube in the weeks ahead if the app proves popular.
Toca Dance is probably my favourite Toca Boca app yet – and that’s a big achievement indeed. There’s lots of potential for children to be creative, as they master the arts of touchscreen choreography.
Toca Dance costs £2.29 for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store.
Read about more music apps for kids on Apps Playground.