App for Traveling Kids: Dora's Skywriting

This app recently was a pick of the week at Starbucks. My daughter is a fan of Dora, so I thought I'd give it a try. We played it for the first time a couple of weeks ago on the plane to Phoenix.

Basically, this app is a game with 2 objects:
1. Trace letters using your finger to move a plane and pick up acorns. The plane leaves smoke, thus "skywriting" the letter. You can choose uppercase letters, lowercase, or a combination.
2. Tilt the screen to make acorns fall into holes. When every hole is filled up, it reveals an object that starts with the letter you just traced.

My daughter enjoyed the animation and letters, and the game kept her engaged for a about an hour of our flight. The game is a bit finicky in that you need to trace the letters very accurately for the game to progress. This is a tricky thing: I understand that the game designers wanted kids to correctly trace the letters, but doing so can be difficult for the game's target audience--and even I didn't trace up to standards sometimes. Because my daughter has the fine motor skills of a kid her age, she had trouble tracing the letters as accurately as the game wanted. She eventually became so frustrated by this that we had to stop, even though she wanted to keep playing. I'm hoping that this frustration factor will decrease as her fine motor skills improve.

Overall grade: B