Poptropica and Australian Girl Dolls
Today I’m going to talk about these two things.
The first I heard about from a friend.
Poptropica
I explored it on Friday while the International Rules Footie was on. I found I couldn’t open it on explorer, only firefox. Poptropica is a game for 6-15yo children. It’s designers have intentionally made it so that you can’t input anything that may be explicit or questionable. The first thing your child (or you) would do is choose a automatically generated character, complete with a cool name like Sleepy Leopard or Hungry Jumper. Then they can customise the look by changing skin colour, hair style and colour and clothes. The character then has to go into the virtual world and explore, find and learn. As you go through you’ll be prompted once to save the game, at this point you choose a screen name and password that is never seen by anyone but you have to remember it to login to your character again. To leave you just close the window and it automatically remembers where you were and you go on from that point. In the “cafes” you get to “interact” with other real people but all the conversation is pregenerated like “What is you favourite colour” and the answers are pregenerated. You can “battle” as well, by playing soduko, paintwar, skidiving, hoops and many more games. TIP: As you go through always click on the people and they’ll tell you helpful stuff.
Australian Girl Doll was created by a frustrated Perth Grandmother who couldn’t find a nice doll for her granddaughter.
They are to be released in a few days. All dolls come with a pair of thongs (for Americans, they’re for your feet! You call them flipflops!) how Australian is that! They aren’t movie stars or catwalk models, they’re girls. They like animals, music and sport and are just like your children. So if you’re sick of the Barbie and Bratz invasion, check them out at Australian Girl Doll.
I found out about it through one of Dave’s Blogging Friends, Wayne.
Tags: Home Tips, Life, Train up a child