CotBot City

What is it

Cotbot City is an interactive car play mat app.  Children can design their own play mat by adding up to 6 different ‘features.’   The different features children can chose from to create their city are: a fire station, an ice-cream parlour, a loop, a hill, a bus station, a garage, a park, a car wash and a rubbish dump.  Children then pick a vehicle – fire truck, ice cream truck, rubbish truck, school bus or an ordinary car.

There are several mini games and fun events to explore as you drive along, all depending on which vehicle you are driving; sell ice-cream with the ice-cream van, drive to the city tip with the rubbish truck and put the rubbish in the right bin, or extinguish fires with the fire truck!
There are no failures – children cannot win or lose; the app is all about imaginative age play.

Tested on an iPad

What our experts think

Cotbot city is a lovely app that has a lot of interactions to delight young children. This is a fabulous app to encourage imaginative play which is so important for children. We really liked the way children could not only select their vehicle, but also design their own city – making choices is an important skill. It also means that there are lots of options when playing, meaning children can return to the app and play it in a different way. Beyond the imaginative, creative and exploratory elements of the game which alone make this a great app, the game includes elements of problem solving particularly suitable for pre-schoolers. The vehicle they choose affects which mini-games they can play and many of the mini-games challenge their cognitive skills whether to select the right icecream for the right customer or put the rubbish in the right recycling bin. The elements of failure as fun is particularly appropriate for this age group and adds an element of humour – our little testers loved dropped banana skins on the rubbish collectors head!
We were delighted to see that the play mat was steering by physically tilting the device too. This ensures the app keeps the child moving and for younger children encourages accuracy motor skills.

It would be even better if...

Being in the UK we would love to see Rubbish being referenced rather than Garbage but that’s a minor complaint!

We also feel this app has so much scope to do even more – clearly one that’s inspired our experts creativity not just the children – for example, it could encourage children to understand road safety by including more traffic on the road, road signs, traffic lights or people crossing or add other locations/vehicles such as the post office, hospital etc.