We Need More Kids Apps Like ’Robot Factory’

Raul Gutierrez, the founder of the Brooklyn-based kids app company Tinybop, worries about the effect brands are having on the way kids play. Here's how he sees it: Today's kids movies and TV shows are great, but as their stories seep into more and more toys, the possibilities for the imagination are constricted as a result.

Whether or not you agree with that diagnosis, it spawned a tremendously cool kids app. The Robot Factory, available for iOS devices for $3, is the first in a series Tinybop is calling "Digital Toys." It's just what it sounds like: an animated workshop where kids can mix and match dozens of parts to create robots of their own design, including an obstacle course-like environment where they can test their bots. It's meant to be highly open-ended. Your robot can have two heads. You can stick legs where arms are supposed to go. The app just provides the parts. The kids supply the stories.

Gutierrez first noticed the brand thing with Lego. Compared to the more generic kits he played with as a youngster, the branded sets his sons were clamoring for seemed to have a more definitive end point. They encouraged kids to build toward the brand-name thing on the box, and since that brand-name thing is what got his kids excited about the set in the first place, there was less of a suggestion that the pieces inside could in fact be used to make, well, anything.

"I don't mean to just pick on Lego," Gutierrez adds. "It's happening all over the place, with physical toys and with digital toys. That play pattern, of having a set of parts, creating something that is the product of your imagination, and then repeating it---changing it, testing it, and starting over again---is really lost."

Robot Factory is built entirely around that play pattern. There's no agenda. There are no levels. There's no story and no real point system. It's more like a set of digital Tinker Toys, just focused on the world of robots.

You can stick five pogo stick legs outward in all directions like spokes on a wheel. You can do whatever.

The app divvies robot parts up into a handful of categories. There are assorted bodies, arms, legs, heads, and other robot miscellany (antenna, claw, floating brain in tank). Within the legs bucket, say, you can choose from tank treads, pogo sticks, spider-type legs and more. Everything can be mixed and matched. You can put a pogo stick where the legs are supposed to go. Or you can stick it on the robot's side, or on its head. You can stick five pogo stick legs outward in all directions like spokes on a wheel. You can do whatever. The app was illustrated by British artist Owen Davey, and the robots themselves trend more toward old-school Japanese monster movies and pulpy sci-fi book covers than Terminator and Transformers.

What makes the creative freedom of the workshop really fun is that you can test out your creations afterward. All of Tinybop's apps---which include beautiful interactive books on subjects like anatomy and biomes, to name a few---are built around dynamic, physics-based animation. This one's no exception. Every piece in the robot kit works differently, imbued with its own unique physics. One leg will have a different weight and motion than the next. In some instances, parts behave differently when they're combined with certain other parts. My pogo stick bot bounded over blocks and plants. A little diminutive tank-like one I made got stuck straight away.

Realistic physics makes bot-testing fun.