Toca Boca’s Science Lab brings Swedish design sensibilities to the classroom

When I was in school, the periodic table was distinctly un-fun—a photocopied chart of elements and atomic numbers to be memorized in rote fashion. Toca Boca’s Science Lab for iPad, out tomorrow, looks like the greatest argument for the gamification of learning to date. (Putting aside how problematic the term gamification has become.) The scientific virtue of the interface is that it illustrates elemental reactions in a playful way. These far-too-cute Swedish embodiments of solids, liquids, and gases will have you bogarting your niece’s or nephew’s tablet, even as grown adults. That is one charming tungsten!