Monsters under the bed aren’t, generally, much fun for children. Monsters on a nearby tablet or smartphone? That’s more like it. And that’s exactly what kids get with a new app called Monster Mingle.
This iPhone and iPad app is the work of British developer Chris O’Shea, whose previous apps as Cowly Owl include Makego, Little Digits – Finger Counting and Dinosaur Mix, which are all well worth a download.
Monster Mingle follows on neatly from Dinosaur Mix, which saw children building dinosaurs by picking up different body parts as they stomped along. This time, monsters are the focus, and they’re doing a lot more than just stomping.
The app starts off with a little jelly-shaped monster, who bounces along when your child holds their finger on the screen. As they go, they’ll find bubbles with different body parts: a pair of lobster claws, a tentacled foot, a beak, wings and so on.
When dragged and dropped onto the monster, they’ll be swapped with its current body parts, often giving it new abilities – the wings enable it to take off and flap up to the sky, for example.
As children explore, they’ll find food for their monster to munch and scenery with different effects, from musical plants on the sea floor to a cloud that rains on them in the sky.
This isn’t a game or a story: it’s pure exploration and experimentation, although that does give children the freedom to invent their own narratives about who their monster is and what it’s doing.
The monsters and scenery are bright and colourful, and the sound effects accompany the action well. There are 40 body parts to find, although as ever with this kind of app, it would be nice to have even more.
It would also be good to have a camera button in the app to make it easier for children to take screenshots of their funniest monsters, although parents can do the job by pressing the iOS device’s Home and Power buttons simultaneously.
Monster Mingle is a playful app rather than an explicitly educational one, although it may spark conversations with your child about beastly biology: why wings are needed for flying and fins for swimming, for example.
There are no in-app purchases or advertisements in Monster Mingle, with Cowly Owl making its money purely from the £2.29 that parents pay for on Apple’s App Store. It’s a small price to pay for this charming, creative app for kids.
