The New iPad App You’ll Want Grandma to Download
By KJ DELL'ANTONIA
KJ Dell’Antonia I bought my mother, who lives a plane ride away, an iPad in the hopes that she would use the FaceTime app to talk with my children. I envisioned her reading to them across the miles, or maybe virtually hanging out as they played. I bought myself a new iPad — one with a camera — at about the same time, and I had big plans for FaceTime. My children have some dear friends who live across the country, and their mother and I thought we could set up two iPads and watch children playing some advanced form of Lego together.
None of that happened. Although my children like FaceTiming with Grandma, the two youngest (7 and a very young-for-her-age 8) are more interested in making faces at their own image on the screen than in looking at my mother. The older two (9 and 12) talk in much the same way they do by phone. How are they? They’re fine. Yes, they went to school today. What did they do? Nothing. It didn’t become the ritual I had hoped. FaceTime calls to their distant friends petered out quickly.
Ustyme has the potential to help my iPad forge the distant connections I had hoped for. On our first try, I couldn’t tear my 7-year-old away, and he has been clamoring for another go ever since.
I downloaded the app and created a sign-in, and my mother did the same. We had to call one another to arrange to connect (ustyme representatives tell me that the next update will include a feature that allows an “ustyme” call to ring in the same way a FaceTime call does). I set the iPad up in front of my son, and he chose Go Fish from among a small collection of classic books and games. The fish-shaped cards appeared on his screen and my mother’s; on his screen, his cards were face up and hers were face down; on hers, it was the other way around. Her face appeared in the corner of his screen; his in the corner of hers.
They played three games before moving on to a version of the Memory card game and Four-in-a-Row (ConnectFour). They read a book together (“The Three Little Pigs”), alternating reading pages and laughing, because if one “turned” a page, both sets of pages changed, and if they didn’t coordinate, they would move two pages forward or backward at once. They played Rock Paper Scissors countless times, in a cleverly characterized but still simple game of choosing your weapon, then watching as your rock gleefully crushes your opponents’ scissors.
And they talked. The games were as simply animated as could be; turning cards, moving checkers. The book’s pages didn’t move, prod him to participate, or sing. There was nothing to distract my son from the game or the story they were sharing; but there was just enough to keep him focused on that shared experience. In between turns, he told my mother the news that comes out more easily for children when they are engaged in something else: He did like his new teacher, but she kept him in from recess last week; his sister had a black eye from falling on the coffee table; his friend Finn got a new kitten. He basked in his grandmother’s undivided attention (rare for the youngest of four), and he didn’t want to stop.
Linda Salesky, a ustyme co-founder, its chief executive and an grandmother, told me that was exactly the kind of experience she was hoping to create. “When our first grandson was born, my husband and I realized that we needed some way to create a connection with him,” she said. “My daughter lives far away — she’s busy, we’re busy — but we still wanted to be able to share some of the same things with him that we loved doing with our daughter, like reading and playing games.”
The ustyme app is available for a free download in the Apple App store (but so far, available only for iPad.) For now, all of the content I tried was free (I tried it out as a consumer, not in a “review” capacity, so what I saw should be the same thing you see). A banner reading “trial” across games like checkers and chess suggests that those will require a paid download later, and as of now, at least, there are no ads on the ustyme app.
I’m hoping our experience with ustyme is the first of many. My 12-year-old is planning to use it to play chess with friends, my 7-year-old asked me to alert his best friend’s mother, and every one of them wants to play with Grandma soon (we will have to loop their other grandmother in this weekend). When it comes to connecting us, the ustyme app promises to help our iPad do exactly what I hoped it would do: provide the technology to bring my children together with distant friends and family, and then get out of the way.