Spice Up Your Kids' Outdoor Trips with These Fun Educational Apps Article

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Spice Up Your Kids' Outdoor Trips with These Fun Educational Apps

Mar 14, 2023 | 0 Votes

by Mel - rate With the popularity of augmented reality (AR) mobile games such as Pokémon Go that juxtapose outdoor gameplay with the convenience of smartphones, it wasn’t long before the concept of outdoor learning together with mobile applications became more prevalent as a way to supplement children’s education and increase their learning engagement levels. Games Educate Kids - Spice Up Your Kids' Outdoor Trips with These Fun Educational Apps

Games Educate Kids - Spice Up Your Kids' Outdoor Trips with These Fun Educational Apps

Considering the clear benefits of outdoor education, downloading the right mobile apps are key to kids’ enjoyment of learning outdoors.

Give your smartphone or tablet a workout while you and the kids head outside for some healthy, tech-infused fun. Apps designed for outdoor adventures let kids of all ages do everything from creating unique creatures and learning about the cosmos, to identifying all the plants and birds in their locale.

No matter what season of the year, there are tons of great reasons to get outside to have fun. And with the educational apps designed to be used outdoors that we recommend in this article, you actually have to take your smartphone or tablet with you! Here are our best picks for informative, educational outdoor apps that you can use to encourage your kids to go outside and play, and learn:

Seek by iNaturalist

One of the world's most popular nature apps developed as a joint initiative by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, iNaturalist helps you identify the plants and animals around you. Get connected with a community of over 400,000 scientists and naturalists who can help you learn more about nature! What's more, by recording and sharing your observations, you'll create research quality data for scientists working to better understand and protect nature.

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek is a fun, safe way to engage kids and beginners in exploring local biodiversity with an interface half way between game and citizen science. It shows you lists of commonly recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Scan the environment with the Seek Camera to identify organisms using the tree of life. Add different species to your observations and learn all about them in the process! The more observations you make, the more badges you’ll earn! What’s more, unlike iNaturalist, Seek does not collect, use, or disclose personal information.

Nature Cat’s Great Outdoors

The advantage of the Nature Cat’s Great Outdoors app is because it is based on the hit PBS KIDS show of the same name, your kids may already be familiar with the main character. Within seconds of downloading the app on Google Play or the Apple App Store, your child will have an on-the-go tool in hand that will inspire them to head outside and explore nature, be it in their own backyard, at the local park, or at a national forest. The app introduces a new adventure for every day that your child logs on and provides them with easy-to-use tools to record and share their observations in fun and creative ways. The app includes fun features such as a compass, camera, sound recorder, sketching tool, and provides an option for your child to create their own nature journals to log (and share w/friends and family) their adventures.

Garden Game for Kids

While there are many gardening apps on the Google and Apple app stores, most of them assume you have a rudimentary knowledge and understanding of gardening. The thing that really sets this one apart is that it is designed specifically for children ages 4 and up and teaches them about the entire seed-to-table process of growing plants. By integrating an easy-to-understand marketplace element to its gameplay, Garden Game for Kids includes a Vegetable Garden, Flower Shop, Greenhouse, Orchard and Garden Shed. You’ll find all the planting, gardening, and harvesting activities you come to expect from such an app, but kids also get to learn about trading fresh produce (and even garden tools) with customers at the marketplace.

Garden Game for Kids immerses your child in the comprehensive activities and operations of running a sustainable food business in a fun and engaging manner. If your little green thumb connects with this app you may end up having a career gardener/farmer on your hands in the years to come or at least instill in them a deep appreciation for plants and agriculture.

Wildflower ID USA Photo Recognition

Ever wonder what plant or flower you are seeing as you hike the great outdoors? This app lets you snap a photo of an unfamiliar wildflower or plant and will instantly fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Available for download for $4.99 on the iOS App Store, Wildflower ID USA Photo Recognition is a great app to educate kids of all ages about the plants around them.

Take note that while this app is focused on plants of the North Eastern United States, companion apps exist for all areas of the US, as well as for trees, birds, and many other topics. They are all powered by Sunbird Field Guides, so you know the pictures are accurate as well as attractive.

The app includes thousands of images of 333 different species, so you can identify your mystery plant in any season or stage. It also shows the entire plant: leaves, flowers, stem and all. This will also help kids learn to recognize it wherever they may find it.

Picture Bird - Bird Identifier

Picture Bird is an extensive bird identifier app that can recognize any bird species by photo or sound. Simply take/upload a picture of a bird or record a bird's sound, and you can get everything you want to know about it.

With machine deep learning technology in pictures and sound recognition, the Picture Bird app can identify up to 10,000+ bird species with incredible accuracy. Kids can go outside, use their smartphone or tablet to record what they observe, either upload a bird picture or record a bird song or call, and the app will compare it with training sets of millions of photos or sounds in the database and provide the most exact match.

The app also contains a full encyclopedia of bird info. In your identified results, you can get detailed bird info including bird appearance, sound, habitat, distribution, feeding habits, etc. The Picture Insect app also provides high-quality articles on bird ID, attracting tips, birding hints, bird sightings, and more.

Night Sky

Night Sky is an app that proves outdoor learning doesn’t have to stop at sunset. The Night Sky app is a truly powerful yet beautiful augmented reality handheld planetarium that is fun for kids and parents alike. The app allows children to quickly identify stars, planets, constellations and even satellites in the night sky by simply holding their smartphone or tablet up to the dark yonder. And don’t worry if neither of you know what in the sky your device is targeting, the navigational features within the app will identify in real time what constellation or other cosmic landmark comes into your camera’s view.

Other than identifying planets, moons, galaxies, constellations and more; the augmented reality feature lets kids take a space walk around the whole solar system. They can take virtual steps onto planets and view them in detail, including their moons and surrounding satellites. If there is a space mission in our Solar System at any point in time, Night Sky will even point your child towards that, too!

The other great part about this app is that it encourages you and your family to escape the lights of the city to find an eco-park or rural area where clear, light pollution-free, cloudless night sky viewing is optimal. In fact, you can use this app as an excuse to camp out– creating the ultimate outdoor classroom for your child on the next long weekend. With Night Sky, the sky is definitely not the limit when it comes to your kids learning about astronomy.

Plum's Photo Hunt

Similar to Nature Cat’s Great Outdoors, Plum’s Photo Hunt is also based on a PBS Kids show, the web-original Plum Landing developed by WGBH, producers of award-winning kids programs such as Arthur and Curious George. Targeting kids ages 6 to 9, the app is designed to extend the series’ environmental science curriculum and is designed to get kids excited about exploring the wonders of our planet.

Plum's Photo Hunt sends kids outside with their device to complete photo missions. This app offers over 150 missions to get kids (and their parents) outside to learn, cooperate, explore, and bond as a family. Missions involve observing and learning about the world around us. Players can earn badges, unlock surprises, and more so that the developers have managed to “gamify” outdoor time.

Kids take pictures of assigned topics, can add characters to their pictures, and can send their photos to Plum which will be posted on the PBS Kids Plum Landing website (although this feature has been disabled as of the app’s latest version, your child can still photograph awesome things out in nature and organize and save their observations all in one place).

The app is completely free to use and includes tons of tips to help parents make the most of outside time with their kids. And since it’s from PBS Kids, you are assured that the info is reliable and well researched, and the activities have been developed and endorsed by top experts and educators.