Disney Color and Play

Zift Advisory

The Disney Color and Play app is an interactive, augmented reality toy that uses specially formatted coloring book pages and your mobile device to animate your children’s drawings. The Disney Color and Play app is available in the App Store and the Google Play Store. This app is rated for everyone and does offer in-app purchases. This app is safe for kids.

About Disney Color and Play

What is Disney Color and Play?

The Disney Color and Play app is an interactive, augmented reality toy that uses a combination of specially formatted coloring book pages and your mobile device to animate your children’s drawings.

The Disney Color and Play app is available in the App Store and the Google Play Store. This app is rated for everyone and does offer in-app purchases.

Disney's Color and Play has “Play Rooms” where kids can fill a virtual play space with objects they've decorated. Once added, these objects become interactive; a jukebox, for example, may activate when tapped on the screen, causing characters in the playroom to notice it and dance.

The Play Rooms draw from a much smaller selection of Disney properties than the coloring book pages. At this time, Play Rooms are available for Sofia the First, Mickey Mouse, and Doc McStuffins, while coloring pages are offered for properties from Frozen to the Good Dinosaur.

Only one Play Room and one coloring book page are available with the free app download. The option to purchase more is presented frequently.

Is Disney Color and Play safe for my kids?

The Disney Color and Play app is fun and safe for children, but has in-app purchases and limited options in the free version. Users start with one page and one Play Room; while the pages can be printed and colored multiple times, children will no doubt tire of them quickly, and the app makes them very aware of available in-app purchases.

While in-app purchases are hidden behind a parent's only dialog, it is trivially bypassed by children of reading age.

The combination of price (additional pages start at $9.99) and promotion of Disney's Color and Play in-app purchases may encourage kids to want to spend money on the game.

If your child is particularly vulnerable to the consumerism bug, you may want to give this Disney property a pass. If, on the other hand, your child is able to handle Disney's constant prompts for additional consumer spending, this app can be a fun introduction to animation and augmented reality.

Kids can develop a greater understanding of the creative potential of technology while polishing their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Educational research supports a strong connection between the development of fine motor skills early in life and academic performance in Kindergarten and elementary education, especially in math and reading.