Karisma Kidz Moodville

What is it

Karisma Kidz is an app that aims to encourage children’s emotional development. The child signs up initially choosing the look and outfit of the Karisma Kidz superhero that they will become for the rest of the game. The sign up process involves providing a parents email address and choosing a password – parents then receive an email and can get involved further such as by setting tasks for the child to complete. 

After first sign up, the child arrives in their den and the first step is to provide additional fun profile information like if they were an animal what would they be! They are then given some seeds and prompted to grow them in the garden – these grow into a Bloomabear (with the help of Plant Food bought after completing your first puzzle) who appears in the den. You need to feed and look after the Bloomabear to keep him happy. 

The game involves a wide range of mini-games and other features:

Moodville: containing a range of mini-games, currently available are:

• Relaxed Resort: The first mini-game the child is prompted to play, offering a range of puzzles from easy (6 pieces) to difficult (24 piece).
• Fear Farm: Sling-shot faces, matching the colour to earn points within a time limit.
• Proud Playground: Create a horizontal row of three smiley faces of the same colour to earn points by swapping the position of one face at a time within the grid.
• Progress Palace: A game of snakes and ladders but to go up ladders or avoid going down snakes you have to answer questions about eSafety correctly.

Shop: a virtual shop – playing games earns Kash which you can use to buy things from the shop. None of this requires or allows any in-app purchasing, currency is all solely accumulated within the gameplay. 

Bloom-a-rang: a self-directed tool used to indicate the player’s emotions.

Hobbies: Listen to the Karisma Kidz theme tune, colour in a picture or cook a recipe.

What our team of testers said

"It's so fun and you can do puzzles" - Girl aged 5

"I liked the map and how its set out and how many different places you can go to" - Girl aged 10

What our experts think

We are delighted to see an app that is clearly aiming to help children to understand and communicate their emotions. The younger children we observed particularly enjoyed completing the puzzles and moving on to more difficult levels. The older children were pleased to see the variety of functionality.
The app has a wide range of features which is great to see and develops a wide range of skills – from fine motor skills in accurately aiming smiley faces in fear farm to cognitive skills completing the puzzles and lining up smiley faces in the Proud Playground. The underlying emotional messages are also a really positive addition.

It would be even better if...

We would love to see the Hobbies area developed further as well as the additional areas of Moodville launched – which we understand are coming soon.