Review of Cozmo’s day off, an interactive app for the iPad, created by Ayars Animation Inc, 2010
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cozmos-day-off-storybook/id409177911
This original interactive story book app centres around Cozmo, a “little green dude”, or space creature. The professionally done illustrations have a “retro” or mid-20th century look. Another “retro” signifier is the use of language from the era, such as “jeepers creepers”. While the language rhymes, it is dated. The “retro” look and sound may be intentional, but for a child in the 21st century it is potentially meaningless. Young children do not tend to “get” nostalgia.
The storyline is minimal: Cozmo wakes up, eats breakfast prepared by a robot, travels across space, runs out of fuel, finally arrives at work only to realise that it’s the weekend. Cozmo comes across as a juvenile alien, his bedroom has toys in it, he looks and sounds young; however he has a job in an office. The storyline seems poorly conceived, barely developed and makes little sense. Would children relate to a character that appears to be their age, but who goes to work?
There is also a secondary (and nameless) character which pops up on nearly every screen/page, says nothing and remains unexplained.
A natural human voice narrates the story expressively; the speed can be varied, and sounds awful – creepily so – when the speed is set to very slow, and like a chipmunk when fast. While this is amusing it contributes nothing to the story, or to keeping the focus on reading. The words light up as they are narrated, not word by word, but line by line. A word-by-word lighting up would be more useful for a beginner reader, as was used in The tale of Peter Rabbit. There is a feature for a reader to record their own voice reading the text and then play it back, which is fun and is certainly interactive, but rests on the assumption that the user can already read competently.
Much of the interactivity seems to be for the sake of interactivity. There is background music which cannot be switched off; it becomes irritating and gets in the way of hearing the narrator clearly. There are lots of sound effects with each haptic event: touching many of the different illustrated objects makes something happen, visually and aurally. However these interactive events have no real purpose or connection to the story. Eaton questions whether the interactive aspects of digital narratives, “might … undermine the effectiveness of the ‘interaction between medias’ that make picture books effective” (2014, p.1), where the ‘interaction between medias’ refers to the words and images of a picture book and how they relate to each other.
What this suggests is that a team of people who know how to illustrate, and how to code software, have created a storybook app, but without any regard for actual narrative, and what contemporary children will and will not find meaningful.
There is an option to minimise the text, and once minimised, the interactive screen elements come into play. They are not obvious, and the child has to explore the illustrations to find what can be tapped. A child may need help from an adult before being able to figure out the functions available in the app, such as minimising the text box. This adult mediation, as well as the numerous multimedia elements (music, hotspots and animations) “can be distracting if they are not aligned with story content or plot” (Kucirkova & Flewitt, 2020, p. 6). This is definitely the case in Cozmo’s day off. There is too much interactivity, it has no connection to the (meagre) story and is distracting. It seems likely that any shared reading between a child and an adult would be about the technical use of the digital functions of the app, rather than reading, story, character or plot. It is also posited that the content of digital books needs to align with 21st century values and topics (Kucirkova & Flewitt, 2020, p.16). As a story, Cozmo’s day off is out of date and out of touch.
As a public library staff member, this is not a storybook app I would recommend. It is a poor example of literature: it has a minimal and confusing story, unrelated to contemporary children. The focus is not on reading, or a quality story, but on lots of interactivity.
And even the advantage of digital functionality is misapplied, such as the text lighting up line-by-line. It would have been relatively easy to make it a word-by-word rendition, but this was not provided.
References
Eaton, A. (2014). The interactive picturebook: Mapping ‘literacy’ on a narrative/technology continuum. Fusion Journal, 5(2014), 1-14. Retrieved from https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=225924795132127;res=IELHSS
Kucirkova, N & Flewitt, R. (2020). Understanding parents’ conflicting beliefs about children’s digital book reading. Journal of early childhood literacy, 0(0), 1-25. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1177%2F1468798420930361