I've revisited an app that I originally started to use when it first came out, and then had on an older iPad.
It's made by Chaim Gingold, who worked on an evolutionary game called SPORE. He also worked on The Sims.
Earth Primer is a sandbox. It allows the user to play about with natural processes on a range of different environments and landscapes.
Earth, A Primer — Trailer from Chaim Gingold on Vimeo.
Earth Primer also fuses a kind of gamification to its own core. You can’t flip through the entirety of this digital book without paying any attention whatsoever — instead, you must work your way through each ‘page’ to unlock subsequent sections: Surface, Water, and Biomes. An exception is the Sandbox, which is unlocked from the get-go, and therein lies a slice of genius. In this part of the app, you get a little hunk of land, and the means to manipulate it in free-form fashion with your fingers. Choose a brush size and a tool, and away you go. Build mountains! Add wind! Bake or freeze the ground! Raise sea levels! But — and here’s the twist — only if you’ve read through the relevant chapters and unlocked the tools first. So: learn before play. For kids — young and old — this is a cunning tactic to ensure everyone doesn’t just skip to the end and spend hours fiddling with what feels like a tactile and super-minimal version of the interesting bit from Populous.
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