An amazingly designed kids app that feels alive.

If all apps were like Tinybop’s, we wouldn’t worry so much about our kids staring at screens. In fact, we might even encourage it.

The 19-person Brooklyn outfit is focused on building a new class of education apps. Drawing inspiration from mid-century encyclopedias and the rich children’s media of the ’60s and ’70s, it takes a “show, don’t tell” approach to explaining the world. The apps are exquisitely crafted playthings, borrowing elements from both interactive textbooks and mobile games. Raul Gutierrez, the company’s founder, likes to refer to them as “digital toys.” The first took youngsters inside the human body. Next up is Mother Nature.

Plants, $2, for iPhone and iPad, features a pair of charming biomes: a deciduous forest and a desert. Each is filled with plants and animals going about their business, rendered in a lovable Tintin-esque style by French illustrator Marie Caudry. You can think of them like tiny living dioramas, responsive to pokes and prods. In a way, the biomes really are alive. Instead of relying on scripted animations, the flora and fauna are governed by AI, relying on an elaborate set of rules that dictate where stuff shows up and how it behaves. Some of this is basic food chain logic–deer run away when a bear shows up–but other aspects were informed by extensive research. Trees of the same species, for instance, will only grow at certain distances from one another, just like they do in the wild. They’re adorable little worlds, but they’re accurate in all sorts of small ways.

Granted, it’s not exactly non-stop action. Bears wander on-screen, sniff around, and wander back off. Clouds blow through; tapping them starts a quick shower. To a certain type of mobile user, one whose attention span has been ground down to an anxious sliver and whose pleasure centers have grown accustomed to Candy Crush’s slot-machine rhythms, Plants might seem about as engaging as, well,plants, which is to say, not very. “The funny thing about this app,” says Gutierrez, “is we’ll give it to adults and they’ll say, ‘I don’t get it. There’s no instructions. You’re not telling us what to do.’”

THE MAGIC OF OPEN-ENDED PLAY

That open-ended design, however, is exactly what made Tinybop’s first app a hit with the juice box set. For that one, Tinybop rendered the human body and its various systems as vaguely cryptic multitouch puzzle. Plants is more cheerful, but both apps share a unique, fundamental quality: To discover all the things they can do, you actually have to play with them.

In the case of new app, a little fiddling reveals all sorts of interesting entry points into the ecosystems. Sliding a tab across the screen gives you an x-ray view into their soil, where you can watch critters burrow and root systems grow. Another button brings up labels with the names of the plants and animals on view. With a little dial in the bottom right corner you can speed up time, letting you watch ponds dry up and acorns grow into trees. (That particular feature has a neat little backstory. Gutierrez has an indelible childhood memory of a scene from the 1960 film version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in which the time traveler watches out a window as entire seasons pass by in seconds. Plants basically recreates that effect.)

IN A WAY, THE BIOMES REALLY ARE ALIVE. INSTEAD OF RELYING ON SCRIPTED ANIMATIONS, THE FLORA AND FAUNA ARE GOVERNED BY AI.

Unsurprisingly, when Tinybop was testing the app, one of the first things kids did was crank on the dial and watch nature play out in fast-forward. But many of the app’s other delights are far less obvious. There’s no friendly pop-up nudging kids to rub two clouds together, for example, but when they inevitably do–maybe after five minutes of playing with the app, maybe after five hours–they’ll see that it generates a charge of lightning in the sky. A little more rubbing and they get a bolt that sets the whole forest ablaze.

As Gutierrez sees it, it’s those hidden, “I didn’t know it could do that!” moments that keep kids invested in Tinybop’s applications. “We don’t tell anyone that you can burn the forest down,” he says. “So when kids find it, they feel like it’s something really special that they discovered themselves.”

Two youngsters playing with the Plants app.  TINYBOP

You could say that it’s Tinybop’s mission to facilitate those very sorts of discoveries. Gutierrez doesn’t just want to whisk kids through interactive lessons; he wants to build them a virtual sandbox. It’s certainly a fresh take on what learning can look like in today’s multitouch world. But Gutierrez is convinced it also has the potential to be a hugely effective one. “When we test with kids, we see that the more directed the experience is, the more it loses a certain kind of magic–the more it’s something to be completed and put away, as opposed to something kids want to come back to later,” he says.

GRAND PLANS

Plants is just the second app in what Tinybop is calling the Explorer’s Series, but the company has already sketched out a roadmap with some thirty titles, covering all sorts of topics. Thanks to a recent injection of $5 million in VC funding, they’ve been able to expand the team and speed-up development. They’ve even started thinking about possibilities for actual, physical toys. “We have so many great ideas cooking, it’s just a question of prioritizing and deciding which ones come first,” Gutierrez says.

Grand ambitions aside, there’s still plenty of stuff the team wants to add toPlants. Updates in coming months will introduce more biomes (tundra and taiga, among others) and bring new wildlife to existing ones. Keeping with the AI-driven design, the new plants and animals will come with their own unique behaviors, making for an increasingly complex simulated ecosystem. In a sense, the app will grow alongside the youngster playing with it. “Over time,” Gutierrez says, “this forest that starts out a little bit spare will end up becoming this really rich place.”