The initial concept of the application is a kind of Detective Story, one that will test a child’s vocabulary and comprehension in understanding the case and the evidence and allowing them to demonstrate this through solving the crime. Some of the initial design sketches are:

• The app will be landscape throughout the whole play through.
• The child will be able to interact and explore the crime scene by clicking on different parts of the image to reveal evidence or talk to witnesses.
• There will always be some guidance or help available for a child, in case they got lost for what to do next in the game.

• Any non-menu text will be clickable. On first click, the word will be said aloud so the child can hear its pronunciation. On a second click, the meaning of the world will be displayed. This is to help a child expand their vocabulary. If a child has issues with too many words in a text, then the app should adjust the difficulty in later text passages.
• Important parts of the text, such as nouns or verbs, will be highlighted in a different text colour to show the importance of the word in understanding the text.
• The image of the witness or evidence will be interactive. If possible, they will be interactive by a method other than touch, such as the motion sensor/gyroscope or the microphone.

The sketches were made with Balsamiq, which is a really useful for mocking up these kinds of quick sketches.

http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/upload_kits/jgcc_tech_for_language_and_literacy.pdf

It explores the idea of using speech-recognition on computers to identify and help children in reading. It does this by having the child read the text out loud and identifies pauses in their speech to determine if the child is having difficulty reading. This is an interesting idea that could be rolled into my project, but it would probably quite technically challenging to do so. Also, I’m not sure if there are any SDKs out there for voice recognition on iPad, so I’d have to look into that.

1. Introduction

2. Problem Statement

3. Literature Review
- Literacy
- Digital Media Use
- Interactive Media Research
- Product Comparisons

4. Design
- Results of research
- Platform choice
- Design Sketches
- System Architecture

5. Conclusion

6. Appendix

Currently, I’ve finished up writing the Literacy section and the Product Comparisons sections of the report. Its a little more time consuming than I expected due to the synthesis of different sources. And I have a lot of references.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center blog recently had a post about four steps to designing toys for creative play. The post describes how new interactive devices such as the iPad are bridging the gap between traditional toys (which are kid-driven and cater toward imagination) and games (which are governed by pre-determined rules and objectives).

The author then describes how children don’t grasp complex concepts like a narrative cycle and that designers need to break down their toys into components like Character, Setting and Emotion.

I’m used to dividing a narrative structure more based on its stages: Introduction, Conflict and Resolution (or Start, Middle and End). I’m thinking that if I was to give a child the option to change the Character and the Setting to setup the Introduction, it could then just play through to a conflict and a resolution. So, essentially, the app would just lay down the tools and the framework of a story and it would let the child “make” the story themselves.

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/teachingresources/english/literacy/concepts/4kcfourthgrade.htm

Similarly, as I linked earlier, the NSW Schools has information about the aspects of literacy:

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/teachingresources/english/literacy/concepts/4kcfourthgrade.htm

Its nice to know that the educators in Australia are looking into the same things that I am. I think it helps to bring a bit of legitimacy to my project and its research, and also shows me I’m on the right track with things.

Also, I almost couldn’t spell legitimacy. I should die.

• Print awareness
• The sound of speech
• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonics
• Speaking
• Vocabulary
• Spelling
• Writing
• Comprehension

Mastering all these aspects is what gives a child true literacy.

From my survey of the current market, there are many apps that aim toward the simpler aspects such as spelling and vocabulary. These apps also tend to be a bit more simplistic.

As an adaptive tool, I think I should aim my project to go between vocabulary and comprehension. Adding interactivity with the child (such as asking them to press something on the screen) to test their ability, the app could scale the difficulty of this interaction from asking the child to interpret and comprehend to just testing their vocabulary.

“Help your child achieve the Power to Read with this collection of four SUPER WHY interactive literacy games.”

So I chose SUPER WHY! as my first product review because it is the one that was used in the Learning: Is there an App for that? report by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (as seen in a previous post). I also played it on iPhone, same as the report. SUPER WHY! is made up of four different games that are meant to help children learn to read. These four games are:

• Super Why’s Story Saver – This involves finding the right word to fit a sentence. The sentences come from common fairytales, like Snow White and Jack & The Beanstalk. To fill in the sentence, three different word choices are shown and the child has to click on one.
• Wonder Red’s Rhyming Game – This involves finding rhyming words. The app shows a word (like Trap) and requires the child to choose which words rhymes with it from two (like Cap and Bear).
• Princess Presto’s Wands Up Writing Game – This involves spelling words letter by letter. The app says to spell the word (like ladder) and then sounds out the first letter. It then asks the child to select which letter makes that sound out of the options shown.
• Alpha Pig’s Lickety Letter Hunt – This involves choosing the right letters to spell a word. Unlike Princess Presto’s game, this one says the name of the letter instead of sounding it out.

The game is in forced landscape. It opens into a menu with the four different characters and very minimal text. The presentation is very colourful, though I think the characters aren’t very memorable. The thing that struck me the most about this game was how slow it was. Not in performance, but in just playing the games. For example, in Alpha Pig’s game, which presented a cross-roads with different letters, when I clicked the right letter it would take me down one of the roads. Instead of going directly to the next crossroads, it went by a blank road that felt like it did nothing but slow down the game. I can only imagine that this slowness is to help with children understanding what is going on.

The game attempts to keep motivation up by introducing “stickers” which can obtained by playing the game. These stickers were used in a “picture book” mode, where you could just stick them on a background.

Another thing I noticed was that the game always required sound. It was impossible play without sound, which is an interesting choice. If you’re playing it on the move or in public, relying that heavily on sound may become an issue as it can be hard to hear. But it might be necessary for the children its targetting.

The Learning: Is there an App for that? report mentioned that this particular game was more successful with 5 year olds, which makes sense upon playing the game. It seems its aimed at kindergarten or just below students, because it attempts to teach the very basics of reading (learning and sounding out letters, word recognition and rhyming). And I guess its pretty good at doing that.

Main Points:

• Landscape
• Requires sound
• Colourful
• A little slow
• Icons with no text
• Stickers for collecting

The choice ended up being pretty straightforward in the end, despite the many suggestions of my engineering friends to choose Android. The reasons for iPad are:

• Currently, most of the children’s apps are currently on iOS (which allows me to look and compare these apps)
• Because of the above, the majority of research into children’s media on these types of devices has been conducted on iPad or iPhone.
• Similarly, most of the development of new apps is on iPad and iPhone because of the already established market and the lack of support and visibility in the Android Marketplace.
• From what I’ve read, iOS handles animation better than Android does.

So the last few weeks, in terms of progress, has been about purchasing an iPad and setting up the development environment for it. Unfortunately, that meant I also had to go out and buy Snow Leopard (because I’m a slow adopter when it comes to OSs for some reason). So once I managed to get that, I installed XCode 3 and the iOS SDK. The iOS SDK cause me some problems (apart from the fact it was a 4GB download and requires only 2GB on the HDD because it includes XCode in the download), but also because it can’t install when iTunes is on. Except as long as the process iTunesHelper is active (which always runs in the hidden in the background unless you kill it), the SDK won’t install. That took awhile to figure out -_-’

But anyway, I’ve got the development environment pretty much all setup and its just a matter of getting used to it now.

Without reading, there can be no learning;
Without learning, there can be no sense of a larger world;
Without the sense of a larger world, there can be no ardor to find it;
Without ardor, where is joy?

This article started out as a complaint against the simplicity and lack of innovation in the educational apps available in the App Store. The writer followed up his first article with a list of suggestions on what to focus on when developing apps, rather than making simple apps:

1. Use depth and breadth of technology
2. Develop or use only the best quality content
3. Do your research with children and parents
4. Develop apps that can be used in groups
5. Make it fun