Coloring & Learn

This app carries more than two hundred and fifty colouring pages, and the important detail is that the pages teach as well as entertain. Colouring is paired with content: the alphabet, numbers, counting, animals and other subjects arrive through the pictures a child is filling in, so the learning happens as a by-product of an activity they would do anyway. That is a more effective route than presenting the same material as exercises. Free mode is the counterbalance. A child can draw, doodle and colour with no structure at all, which matters because directed activity and open creation develop different things and children need both. Glow colouring mode uses neon paint on a dark background, producing an effect that has no equivalent on paper and reliably captures a child's attention when ordinary colouring has worn thin. The tools mimic real drawing implements, so the experience resembles paper rather than a paint program. The app is explicitly aimed at families rather than at children alone. Colouring alongside a child or holding colouring contests with them is suggested by the developer, and that shared use is where these apps are most valuable: an activity a parent and child can do together without either being bored.