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HEN I c a l l Sve t l a n a D r a g aye v a s h e ’s in the Kenyan bush. The 33-year-old, who created the educational app Virry to teach children about wildlife, is filming there: recording rhinos, cheetahs, baboons and vervet monkeys in the savannah and wetland of the L ewa Conser vanc y. “We’re discovering that animals do whatever they want to do,” she tells me, laughing. “So we’ve ended up filming much more than we initially expected.”

Virry is aimed at children aged two to seven and has a mix of live feeds of animals and games. “Our mission is to show children that the animal world is amazing,” Dragayeva explains. “And to teach them in a non-didactic manner.”

Her work in Kenya is breaking new ground for the app: the footage she’s recording will be used on it and there’ll be a live stream from the wilds to your iPhone or iPad. Until now the animals that users can watch on the app have been in captivity, in a few wildlife parks with high welfare standards.

The games are interactive to enable children to engage with the animals: you can shake the iPhone or shout into it to fill up baby rhino Bubar’s mud pool with water so he can cool down, feed raisins to Jantho the orangutan or tip worms into the dirt to see a family of meerkats scratch around for their supper. Today a new set of animals will be added to this virtual menagerie, including macaques and fruit bats.

“Fruit bats have been my biggest surpri se,” Dragayeva says. “Some people suggested we shouldn’t film them — thinking they would be boring — but they are so active at night and so cheerful. They’re super-cool. When we were filming them for the interactive g a mes t h e y ke p t landing on our director’s hat. I like showing children that you don’t necessarily need to think an animal is attractive to love it. It isn’t just about bears and pandas.” She pauses. “Although I ’d l i ke to film pandas eventually too.”

A former film producer who is based in London but “lives on a plane”,