TICKLY PRICKLY

A very minimally interactive app for preschoolers uses familiar animals and bugs to explore the sense of touch.

The illustrations of paper, cloth and paint evoke a sense of texture, and the gentle rhymes, which are the true strong point of this app, introduce a vocabulary for tactile sensations. Moths are "Whisper fluttery. Softly shuddery," and a fish is "Slippery, slickery. Turny and twistery." Enhanced with real sound effects—a purring cat, a neighing horse, even a yippy little puppy—each page has only one moving animal or set of animals. The motion and sound can be restarted with a tap, although a clumsy touch too easily flips the page and might be confusing and distracting for little ones. Tapping a puzzle-piece icon at the top of each page turns the illustration into a four-piece puzzle for children to “put together.”

Amid the plethora of hyperinteractive apps available for this age group, the barely-there animations are underwhelming even for toddlers, but the charm of the original book remains intact.