Map My Globe Full App Review

Posted by Jennifer

App Name: Map My Globe Full

Overall Rating: 4/5

Mom’s Rating: 3.5/5

Kids’ Rating: 5/5

Recommended Grades/Ages: Grades 2 – 6

Skills Developed: World Geography, Continents, Puzzles, Trivia

Available On/Price: iPad – $2.99

A free lite version, Map My Globe is also available for iPhone/iPod and for iPad – it includes the complete Map the Globe activity.

Reviewed on: iPad

App Description:

Map My Globe Full encourages children to explore the world and its continents through puzzles, flashcards, and quizzes – each of which awards points that can be used to buy virtual rewards that appeal to world travelers (backpack, binoculars, hat etc.) Once all the rewards have been purchased, your child is considered a world traveler.

Map the Globe is the simplest geography puzzle in the app and focuses on placing the continents, oceans, and poles.  Map the Continents goes into much more depth by providing a detailed puzzle for each continent (excepting Antarctica).  Each of these puzzles includes three difficulty levels.

Easy – the correct placement point of each country flashes to indicate where the puzzle piece should go.

Moderate – the country name and shape are displayed and need to be matched with the outlines on the map.

Challenge – the name of the country is displayed on its own and needs to be dragged to the outline of the country it corresponds to on the map.

Tapping a country on the map at any time will let you hear its name, double tapping a country will bring up basic geographic information – capital city, regional languages, currency, and neighboring countries.

Players can study up on their geography facts in the Flash Cards and Fun Facts section, where your child can choose a continent to study up on.  Each continent includes an overview as well as sections on landmarks, animals, and fun facts.

These facts are used to generate the questions in the Quiz Master section of the app – a straight forward, text-only, multiple-choice quiz.  There are five levels included which unlock as each previous level is passed.  Each level presents 10 quiz questions.  Incorrect answers display the correct answer so your child can learn as they progress through the questions.  The questions are resorted each time a level is played, and not all questions are asked each time to provide variety.

The scoring for the various activities varies according to the level of difficulty in general – the easier levels award fewer points and the higher levels award more points, encouraging children to press on. A very detailed accounting of the points earned in Map the Continents can be found by tapping the flashing score for this activity from the main scoreboard.  If a perfect score is achieved the app will present a Geography Championship Trophy.

Sound and music can be turned off independently of each other from any page in the app. Individual player scores can be erased from the scoreboard if desired. The app does include introductory narration, but the rest of the app is silent and requires an independent reader.

Other Notes: This app does not include in-app purchases, advertising, external links or social media integration.  The free lite version does include ads and external links to other apps from the developer.

What We Liked:

Map My Globe Full is an app that really encourages family participation – with the option to set up four profiles and the scoreboard that tracks family progress and scores – children are continually motivated to keep working with the app as long as other family members stay engaged.

My nine-year-old has really enjoyed working towards a full set of world traveler gear (and earning more points than mom) with this app.  She’s also a bit of a trivia buff, and has been coming to me with new facts she’s learned by working her way through  the Quiz Master questions.  “Mom, did you know that China is the world’s largest manufacturer of cars?”  According to her it’s just really, really cool.

My younger children have also enjoyed working with the geography puzzles, but since they aren’t independent readers, the quizzes and flash cards are of limited use to them.

The app is colorful, with fairly straightforward navigation, and contains some very detailed geography puzzles that do a great job of providing large puzzle pieces that shrink down to scale once they are placed on the map.

What We Didn’t Like:

There are a few things that could use more refinement – profile pictures turn upside down and sideways when you re-open the app, and if you go into Map the Globe and back out without playing your previous score is erased on the scoreboard.

Overall:

Map My Globe Full is an opportunity to engage in competitive, social gaming around geography puzzles and quiz questions with your family.  With seven detailed geography puzzles, five quiz levels, and fun, travel based rewards, this app will more likely succeed in engaging children who need motivation to work with geography than more open-ended apps will.

Buy this iPad app now for $2.99!

Have you downloaded this app?  Let us know what you and your children thought – leave a comment!