What is “Safari Tales?”
Paraphrased from the Safari Tales press release
SAFARI TALES™ is an enchanting animal adventure game which encourages exploration in reading and vocabulary skills by casting the player as both adventurer and storyteller. Your child joins five baby animals as they explore the African savannah, playing games & collecting relics and artifacts as they go.
Throughout their in-game adventures, kids learn countless facts and figures about the environments they explore as well as information about the inhabitants and items they encounter on their way. During this adventure, they build both knowledge and reading skills & learn to structure sentences and questions.
At the end of each play session (for which you can set a timer!), the adventure is turned into a digital storybook that can be shared later with loved ones. Each storybook can be saved & stored in the game and can be shared over & over again, strengthening literacy, reasoning & inquiry skills.
Aimed at children aged between four and ten, SAFARI TALES has been developed in conjunction with pupils and teachers, to ensure that content is age-appropriate and gameplay fun. “Feedback from both kids and adults is invaluable for us as a studio,” said David Miller, award-winning teacher and now Director of Learning at Kuato Studios. “This participation in the development allows us to pinpoint particular opportunities where the child’s engagement with the gameplay, their creativity and performance peak, producing the perfect learning experience.”
What did we think of Safari Tales?
Whenever we get a new app for the little ones, I sit down by myself & try it out first – just to make sure that it’s something we are happy to have them playing and this was no exception. I sat down on the sofa and set the app up for Evey – using the profile screen.
Once I’d done that I prepared myself for 5 or 10 minutes, at the most, of exploration just to make sure it was appropriate. Twenty-Five minutes later Evey was tugging on my arm asking if she could have a go yet! I had become totally involved in the game almost immediately, changing colours & patterns on my elephant calf and searching the jungle for my friend the lion cub, I was most disappointed when I had to hand it over to Evey.
You begin to play as an elephant calf and you direct the calf around the jungle, and other environments, to find the jamming jungle beat animals. During your travels, you can find other baby animals such as a crocodile, a lion, a cheetah a rhino and you can also play as these animals too! Each animal has their own, personal adventures, so you are not just travelling around the same story as a different animal.
At the end of each adventure a new “Safari Tale” is created. You & your kiddos can then read the story of the adventure they have just completed. Every tale is different and Eveys face lit up when we read the first one. She was pointing to the pages and squealing “That’s where I went! That’s what I did!”. She was so excited and this was a truly unique experience for us both. As well as the fun of having the adventure specific tale, the book was good for Eveys reading & comprehension practice. I particularly liked the way some words were highlighted and alternatives are given, expanding her vocabulary. You can save all of your Safari Tales and read them over & over.
Darwin the meerkat guides you through the adventures, giving help whenever you ask. Outside of the main game section, there is an area where you can ask Darwin about the animals, using a simple tumbler with words to build your own questions. The questions all connect to the animals in the app & help you to learn more about their feeding, sleeping & other lifestyle habits.
There is also a ‘Parents Corner’that allows you to control certain elements. Access to the game can be PIN-restricted, parents can set their child’s reading age and can control game length from a variety of session times.
Evey absolutely loves Safari Tales and I feel very comfortable with her playing it. Along with the reading skills she is building, she is also learning about different animals and how they live. She enjoys unlocking the hidden treasures and collecting stickers during her adventures and likes to proudly show me her achievements in the ‘sticker book’.
Interestingly, Gabriel also enjoys it. Because of his autism he rarely wishes to play an app with me and he certainly never asks to play. Yesterday he came up to me in the kitchen and made the noise he uses to indicate that he wants something. He took me by the hand & led me to the cupboard where the iPad-Mini is kept, opened the cupboard and pointed to it. I turned it on and he chose Safari Tales, took me by the hand again and settled us both down to play. This experience alone was worth having the app for!
We would definitely recommend Safari Tales as a great addition to your educational app library. You can find out more and purchase, by following the links below.
Join in the adventure at www.safaritalesgame.com For more information visit www.kuatostudios.com and follow @KuatoStudios on Twitter and Facebook
More About Safari Tales
SAFARI TALES feeds inquisitive minds through an adaptive gaming engine built around Apple’s SIRI technology. Curious kids are encouraged to construct over a thousand different questions to ask their in-game guide, Darwin, who will supply intelligent and fact-filled answers, aiding literacy skills in sentence structure, reading, and creative thought.
“Kuato Studio’s goal is guilt-free gaming. With SAFARI TALES and DINO TALES, our aim has been to harness the power of engagement that kids have with really good games and use it to enhance literacy and learning,” said Kris Turvey, Creative Director at Kuato Studios. “Our games allow children to explore beautiful worlds packed full of adventure while fuelling their imagination to produce creative interactive storybooks that can be read with mum or dad.”
