The app for tablets and smartphones is the heart of the Artoo ecosystem. It enables kids to make friends with the bear, discover his world, and play with art in an unusual and fun way.
The magical brushstrokes of Van Gogh, the evocative forms of Kandinsky, the haunting insights of Paul Klee. Thanks to the Artoo app, kids can explore an entire gallery of artworks. But above all they can have their say!
Artoo is not art explained TO kids, but BY kids: the app’s furry protagonist wants to know what each one of them feels when they look at a work of art and just what they see. And their thoughts are so precious that Artoo guards them jealously in a virtual jam jar.
The Artoo app lets children record and play back their thoughts and feelings when they look at a painting. Then they can listen to the ideas of other kids and the explanation of Umberto, the museum director.
An educational and fun activity for families, the app is also a valuable educational resource that integrates art with the new technologies, ideal for teachers. Several primary school teachers have already inserted Artoo into their programmes by organising workshops dedicated to artistic works for their pupils.
Kids can also give free rein to their creativity by drawing directly in the app, taking the graphic motifs of different painters as their starting points and thereby learning about the multiplicity of artistic styles in a fun way, or just drawing freely.
The Artoo app was conceived as a gentle approach to using digital tools, which we believe is the right approach for children: collaborative and non-competitive, with an element of creativity, not mere passive engagement, and with age-appropriate stimuli.
The digital tools available to teachers are gentle because:
they favour relaxed and non-compulsive use
they support active user participation
they promote group/family use rather than individual use
hey allow kids to manage them independently and safely.
All this while presenting simply as fun tools, aesthetically refined and easy to use.