Best of ABC Splash - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

This review of Best of ABC Splash was completed by the Australian Council on Children and the Media (ACCM) on 24 April 2016.

About the app

This section contains details about the app provided by an ACCM Reviewer.

ACCM review

This review of Best of ABC Splash contains the following information:

• The level to which the game was reviewed
• App description
• Reviewers comments
• In App purchasing
• Online information
• Gambling
• Advertising and product placement
• Gender stereotypes and sexual references
• Coarse language
• Game playing behaviour which may be of concern to some parents
• Other

The level to which the game was reviewed

This app was reviewed for approximately 1 hour.

App description

Best of ABC Splash is an educational learning tool for children and teachers. The objective is to view videos presented on a range of educational topics, and then subsequently complete the quizzes provided. The skills include comprehension of the material presented, as well as motor skills to utilise the functions of the app.

Reviewers comments

When the app is first installed and opened, players are shown several tutorial-style screens containing instructions on how to navigate within the app. There are images that display where the menu icon is, how to view additional content (e.g. lesson starters, transcripts, and curriculum links), how to favourite and share clips, and how to view the settings. After this, players are taken to a central home page, containing various links that are presented alongside images. These links include: Rhymes, Experiments, Minibeasts, Measuring, Celebrations and Traditions, Convicts and Colonial Australia, Australian Wilderness, Australian Animals, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Food, Sounds, Counting Dinosaurs, Alphabets and Antarctica. Players are able to select any of these topics in order to explore the related area.

When the Rhymes link is clicked, players are taken to a screen which presents various options – this includes 5 activities related to rhymes, each of which contains one video, ‘clip extras’, as well as a Quiz to take. Upon clicking on the video, a full-screen animated movie begins to play. The videos are a sing-a-long style clips that go for approximately 1-5 minutes, and contain a brief story (e.g. ‘it’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring’) that relate to the original topic area. It is possible to pause and skip through these videos.

When players click on the ‘clip extras’ section, there is a transcript of the entire song, key information (including the appropriate age level, a description, the strand and substrand, etc), as well as a lesson starter (where instructions are provided for discussion when viewing the video in a class environment: “The title of the song describes how it is raining. Do you think that it is raining a little or a lot in the song? What do you do when you can’t go out to play when it is raining?”).

Other topics, such as Counting, contain videos related to mathematical material. In the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History topic, there is a subtitle presented on each image stating ‘Viewer advice. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following media resource may contain images and voices of people who have died.’ Some of these videos feature Aboriginal individuals, with voiceover narrations including real-life video content such as ‘These young people are called the Towra Team. They’re a group of trainees learning to take care of the land and their culture here on the southern shore of Kamay Botany Bay National Park.’

The app contains 75 different videos in total, as well as 375 quizzes that children can complete. The content and topics are designed to supplement the Australian School Curriculum. The content appears age-appropriate. When this app was reviewed, the Quiz components did not appear to be functional. After clicking on the ‘Take Quiz’ icons, players were taken to a different screen where they were unable to click on anything other than the links to other videos within the topic. This may be a bug within the app at present.

In App purchasing

No:

Online information

Players are able to share their favourite videos from the app with other individuals via social media websites (e.g. Facebook, Google+, etc)

Gambling

No simulated gambling content was found during this review.

Advertising and product placement

N/A.

Gender stereotypes and sexual references

N/A.

Coarse language

N/A.

Game playing behaviour which may be of concern to some parents

This is an educational information app and does not contain any game playing behaviour which may be of concern to parents.

Other

N/A.

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