Fifty years on, I still try not to be like Goofus.

The wondrous magazine of my childhood, is an app:

Highlights, that ubiquitous magazine in the waiting rooms of childhood, has gone interactive.

Highlights Every Day, a new app from the magazine publisher, goes beyond simply making the children’s magazine digital. It translates the immersive experience of delving into a Highlights magazine into the lexicon of today’s mobile natives – our kids.

The app offers new content every day with a subscription priced at $7.99 a month. While it’s rated for kids ages 4 and up, younger users might enjoy the app as well.

Content is broken down into four basic categories: stories, puzzles, videos and quizzes. The first time you launch the app that day, a present appears. You tap it to unwrap the day’s content, up to five things to read, watch or do.

My kids and I played around in the free offerings a bit before dinner, warming up with some Hidden Picture puzzles to sharpen our focus.

My 5-year-old, a new reader interested in space, tapped on a story about how stars explode and a video about Pluto. The story was contained to two pages and was meaty enough to be educational and short enough to keep him engaged and seeking more. The Pluto video was current with details about the images sent back last fall by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

Stories in the app work like the mobile books kids have been growing up with, complete with vibrant photos or illustrations and the three modes of reading – narrated, autoplay and read by myself.

The narrated read-to-me function includes a mix of male and female readers of a variety of ages, including children. In terms of the story content we sampled, there was a mix of science, illustrated fiction, discussion prompts and the arts.

Text is highlighted in groups rather than as each word is being read, as many of the digital interactive readers out there do. I was told the app’s focus isn’t necessarily on pre- and early readers, but they may add the word-by-word reading functionality in a later iteration.  

The interactivity on the highly addictive Highlights staple Hidden Pictures is a welcome update to the flat page experience, with subtly embedded images highlighted when tapped and hints popping up long enough to help but not ruin the fun of discovery. The object search puzzles in particular are challenging enough to keep more advanced children engaged as well.

For my family, the puzzles really were the most engaging aspect of the app, with the stories and quizzes tied for a close second.

Some of the quizzes feel a bit like the popular mental molasses of Buzzfeed – with quizzes like what animal are you? – and others actually test knowledge.

The videos had a nice mix of real children discussing issues submitted by readers and performing jokes corny enough to elicit a knee slap from a kid and a groan with eye roll from an adult. There were also educational videos with text on screen to highlight points in the narration, always tying the experience back to the skill of reading.

In a news release about the app, Kent Johnson, CEO if Highlights for Children Inc., explained: “What’s truly unique about Highlights Every Day is that it’s neither a digital replica nor a replacement for our much-loved print publication, but an easy-to-consume, mobile platform inspired by Highlights magazine.”