'Our line is pretty hard on this: the notion of screen time is a flawed concept.

Opinions can be heated on this topic, but Jeffery tries to defuse them. So, children getting more 'screen time' means they're getting less books, bikes, bricks and ball-games time, as their parents use a tablet or smartphone as a digital babysitter. One common concern – which is often expressed by commenters when I write about children's apps on this site – is that digital play is cannibalising physical play. Not all parents like the idea of digital construction and play, though. 'We tried to step back and look at construction play in general: what is fun about building, and how could we facilitate that? Which is where the design choice of using these characters that have specific building or painting powers came from.' 'Construction is a classic play pattern for toys, from Lego and building blocks through to the obvious digital version, which is Minecraft,' says Jeffery. That means Toca Builders skews slightly higher in its target age group – five and upwards, thinks Jeffery – but remains rewarding for a longer time as children master its controls and let loose their imaginations. We wanted to give them a little more depth and complexity.' Toca Builders is one of them, and there's another one coming out after the summer. 'Yes, we've been doing a few slightly-riskier, more difficult-to-make apps. While it shares the open-ended nature of Toca Boca's apps, it's a bit more… Kids switch between six robot characters, each with their own function, to build and paint blocks into whatever shapes they like, from trees and houses through to monsters and mountains. Toca Builders takes its cues from Minecraft, the crafting game that is already very popular with older children, but ditches the gaming elements in favour of pure sandbox creativity. Toca Boca's latest app came out this week, and is its most ambitious yet. Toca Boca bought Canadian firm Zinc Roe in March and rebranded the studio as Sago Sago. Those profits are fuelling expansion both in terms of platforms – it recently released its first Android app on the Google Play store – and acquisitions. It doesn't break those down between paid and free downloads, but chief executive Björn Jeffery says Toca Boca posted 'a healthy profit' in 2012, which is rare for its sector.

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