Early childhood is a crucial period for the individual since it promotes child growth and development, which is influenced by environmental resources, types of toys, family practices, among others. Currently, digital media are one of the main pastimes of children, whose use is growing exponentially. There is a great offer of applications in virtual stores, without corresponding to their quality, which aim only to entertain and distract the user. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate whether the available applications are able to promote interactivity and children's learning, in addition to offering recreational and educational content that stimulate the potential of that age group.

Evaluate the interactivity and learning of games/applications for children aged between two and three years, available free of charge on the internet.

This is a descriptive study, preliminary to the development of a randomized controlled study. It started with the search and selection of applications in the Google Play® online store, compatible with the Samsung A7 Tablet operating system; associated with Google search and the Tablet's own app store, combining terms for learning and interactivity purposes. Then, each application was used by 15 two- to three-year-old children from a municipal public education institution, in a single session to verify the following criteria: (1) interactivity: critical thinking, active participation, decision-making; (2) learning: activities that stimulate cognitive, fine motor, receptive language, expressive language, and social-emotional development; (3) suitability: age, developmental period, multiple domains and (4) outcomes: challenging, non-frustrating activity that provides feedback. For analysis, a form was produced with 15 questions evaluating learning, interactivity, suitability, and results, with response options on a Likert scale, where 0 (“not at all”) to 3 (“quite a lot”), completed by the researchers through the participant observation technique. For the analysis of responses, scores were calculated on each axis, with a maximum value of 1.00, with 0.6 being the minimum value considered appropriate.

By combining the terms searched, 20 applications were found, of which only 7 were selected because they were age-appropriate and freely available. As for the evaluated criteria, the apps obtained an average score of 0.74 in the learning item (0.59 - 0.84), 0.82 in interactivity (0.41-0.95), 0.78 in adequacy (0. .53 -0.90) and 0.81 in the results item (0.47 – 0.96).

Just over 2/3 of the applications showed good results in terms of interactivity, learning, adequacy, and result, revealing their potential to stimulate critical thinking, active participation and decision-making in children, as well as to enhance their development. child development.

Guiding the population not only about the best apps, but also about the search and selection criteria, giving autonomy to those responsible for identifying games that will benefit the children who will use them. In addition, the selection of applications contributed to the realization of a randomized study, which has the purpose of investigating the influence of passive and active media on child development.