G review

G is an iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad app that is essentially a gravitation simulator. You create little balls that each have their own gravity, density, and momentum and the point is to create objects of different sizes and watch them interact to other balls’ gravitational pulls.

I can’t really call this app a game, but it doesn’t really serve as an effective teaching aid either. I guess what I can really call it is a time burner. From some of my experiments with this app, it’s a tool to teach how distance, velocity, and mass all work each other with gravity and Newton’s Laws of Universal Gravitation.

When you start the program you are given no tutorial, no information, and the most minimalist interface I’ve ever seen. What am I looking at? What’s that? Why is there a pause button? Oh… the pause button toggles the movement of the little balls. I was slowly realizing that these things were gravitationally linked to the center yellow ball.

After 2 minutes of playing around and watching smaller planets get sucked into the gravity of my sun, I realized that it was nearly impossible for me to set up a universe that didn’t constantly suck itself inwards. Granted, I have no idea how the mathematics work behind this app, but seriously, they don’t explain anything. It is classified as an educational game, but from what I can tell, this app is for teachers to show some kind of visual aid example of whatever lesson they are teaching.

At the price of $2.99, this app has some interesting concepts, but ultimately, it’s for very specific people with very specific interests. For everyone else, this is not for them. If the developer adds some information, tutorials, or maybe some puzzles that each take advantage of dynamic visual examples, then maybe this would be a better app.

AppSafari Rating: 2.5/5

AppSafari review of G was written by Joseph Ho on August 2nd, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Education, iPad apps, Physics Based, Reference, Universal, Utilities. Page viewed 4287 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.