Gro Garden & Gro Recycling | educational environmental game apps for children

✔ iPad + iPhone ✔ Android | apps for children ages 3-6 years

The Swedish kids app developer team Gro Play Digital have specialized in educational, environmental and ecological games. Today we’d like to introduce our little explorers to two of those apps. Both apps teach children about sustainability, recycling and organic gardening, children learn the environmental issues in a simple and entertaining way. We’ll start with Gro Garden, which is available for iOS and Android devices.

1. Gro Garden – iPad, iPhone + Android

With the app Gro Garden, kids will enter an interactive organic garden, where they can plant and grow their own plants and crops.  You start off with 5 different kind of seeds, but more get unlocked throughout the game. As soon as the seeds have been sowed, they’ll need the care of the sun and a little bit of rain to help them grow. Passing rain clouds can simply be dragged to the right position in order to water the little crops and plants. The sun rays work in a similar kind of way, basically via finger swipe to the correct plant.

As soon as the plant or crop has grown, it’s ready to be harvested. Until then, several clouds and sun rays need to be caught first. Besides, various micro organisms come and visit the organic garden later on in the game, which need to be removed and destroyed. How all of this looks in action, can be seen in our YouTube trailer:

More game scenes: At home and at the compost heap

Kids can freely decide how many plants and crops they’d like to harvest, until they’ll leave the 1. game scene with the organic garden and search for two other areas of the game. Kids can take their harvested crops and vegetables to the kitchen table, where they can wait for the freshly harvested food with the Gro animals (octopus, bird, fox, rabbit). Whilst feeding the animals, leftovers of the vegetables can be collected during the third part of the game. New nutritious soil can be gained at the compost area, which can also be used on the farming field, this is how the organic cycle of the garden closes.

2. Gro Recycling  ✔ iPad + iPhone

A similar cycle like in Gro Garden is also presented in the app Gro Recycling, which is an older app. Starting point in this app is a little sorting game, with a changing selection of three different garbage cans. Different kind of garbage is passed on at the bottom of the screen, which need to be sorted into the right garbage can at the top. The funny bins are excited and also make some funny sounds and noises whilst being fed. You can hear this in our YouTube trailer below.

The recycling plant

A crane appears after a while, with which you can take one of the bins to the recycling plant. The sorted litter will fall into a reprocessing plant, that will recycle the whole rubbish into a new product i.e. an empty bottle into a honey pot.

The individual components of the system react with funny sounds when they’re touched. In addition, some buttons and some levers can be pulled and pushed, that will play two different kind of songs. Kids can decide how long they want to watch the process and when they want to change to the third view.

The Picnic

In the third view, the new product in recycled packaging, reaches it’s final consumer – in this case these are the funny Gro animals having a picnic of course. Unfortunately, the picnic scene is not interactive, but plays automatically. All that is shown is how the animals consume the so called honey pot and recycle the packaging in the sorting game with the various bins. This is how the cycle starts all over again. Where a total of 6 different trash cans and recycling facilities can be discovered.

Gro Garden & Gro Recycling kids app rating

Both apps are valuable educational games that have been gorgeously implemented with awesome graphics. Even toddlers can already learn about the environment and the elementary cycles in both apps. All in all we prefer Gro Garden, as there are more interactive possibilities and items that can be collected. We also find the different prices of the apps a little disappointing. Whilst the Android version of Gro Garden only costs $ 0.99, the iOS app costs $ 2.99.