It’s still a popular choice for the six-year old too. It’s become my youngest’s favourite thing to do on the iPad. This, I figured, looked fun but wouldn’t have much longevity – especially for the eldest one. I was disappointed: it’s a popular and highly regarded app and I’d been expecting more. Well that’s what I assumed when I first played it with my six and two year olds. But even then, surely, it sounds far too simple for all but the very youngest, right? Simple, intuitive, requiring little or no adult help. To fly your robot around, you just pull it on the screen in the direction you want it to go. The robot is built by dragging the selected part onto an outlined area, but it’s very forgiving of poor accuracy. It’s a children’s game after all, and the concept and controls are suitably simplistic and easy to grasp. Once your robot is active, you get to fly it through a test area full of collapsible obstacles searching for three stars and the magnet that ends the course. For each body part there are three options to choose from, and the options vary on each play chosen randomly from what appears to be a very large pool indeed. In the first instance you build your robot, picking its legs, body, head and left and right arms from a selection of scrap metal parts.

The app features two distinct phases to play through. And now children’s app developer Toca Boca have made the link on iOS with Toca Robot Lab. We’ve seen it enshrined in films and toys pretty much since the idea of a robot was first mooted. Whatever the age, whatever the gender, there seems some almost mystical connection between the two. Toca Robot Lab is a machine for converting scrap into smiles

Toca boca robot lab