Report apps for children seminar 2015

Cinekid for Professionals Cinekid for Professionals Seminar

Apps for Children 22 October 2015

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Cinekid for Professionals 2015

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How do you create a good educational app for children? And how do you guarantee its success? During the seminar ‘Apps for Children’, presented by Kennisnet, ECP and Cinekid, several successful educational apps were highlighted and the audience was invited to consider what developments await us? Brechtje Spoorenberg: KPN (Dutch Telecommunications Company), developer of MyBee How do you make a family-friendly app for young children? KPN’s original idea, said the company’s Brechtje Spoorenberg, was to provide children with a fun and safe way to take their first steps on the internet. The company first developed MyBee as a PC browser 7 or 8 years ago, but soon switched to a tablet version, again in close co-operation with parents. The target group was children aged 2-6. MyBee is based on whitelisting fun places for children to hang out, not blacklisting the places where they shouldn’t be. “We’ve always had the vision that we should stimulate the positive things and not forbid the negative things.” Spoorenberg listed the USPs of MyBee as follows:

MyBee classifies content in terms of gender and interest

New information can be added by parents

It is based on a safe search among apps games and websites

It offers evolving content based on age

It features a parental control centre

Content is provided by third parties

It is developed together with parents and children Children choose their own avatar, with which they enter the app and then opt for a custom background. One of the safe things about the app is that children only get MyBee content, even on YouTube. There is no ‘dead end’ in MyBee; there is always new content for the child to explore. Parents can adjust control settings, ranging from free to strict. Search results are based on the MyBee whitelist and Wizenoze search,



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that adapts layout and search results to a child’s reading and competence level. Ilona Jens: Mediasmarties (Dutch content provider and app advisory agency) How do you make parents happy with quality-apps? Mediasmarties offers parents a guide through the app labyrinth. Parents don’t mind their kids lounging around on tablets. But they do want it to be challenging, playful and educational at the same time. But how can parents tell whether an app is educational or not? That’s different for each parent and each child, said Ilona Jens, who runs Mediasmarties, a private sector advisory agency founded by the Dutch government nearly three years ago as part of its media literacy policy. At Mediasmarties Jens and her team produce and review children’s content, aimed at providing children with positive experiences using digital media devices. Currently they offer some 2000 reviews, 350 of which are app reviews. This provides parents with enough information to make an informed choice, instead of choosing apps based on limited info. What criteria do parents use when choosing an app? This is an important question for app and game developers. The University of Sheffield has conducted research regarding this issue in collaboration with Cbeebies (BBC). Using this research as a base, Mediasmarties conducted its own survey among 20 Dutch families. What parents found important in apps:

Fun

Easy to use

Educational

Stimulation of creativity What they don’t like:

Too expensive



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In-app advertising/purchases 45 per cent of parents are prepared to pay if the app is extensive, challenging and educative. They would also like a free trial and a clear privacy and security policy. The user interface should also be very clear and simple. Klazien Brummel and Berlinda Kerkhof: Follow a Muse (Publisher) How can you inspire children with art and culture in apps? Follow a Muse (FAM) is a young publishing initiative that produces apps that deliver art and culture to schools, often in close collaboration with cultural institutions. FAM has produced Amon en Amara for children aged 5-7, which offers a story about friendship and teaches children about ancient Egypt.

The company’s Klazien Brummel and Berlinda Kerkhof elaborated on the development of FAM’s latest app Romeo and Julia, based on a second co-operation with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. How does this app stimulate children? And how can it contribute in the classroom?

Obstacles “Engaging the teacher is the Holy Grail we are aiming for”, said Brummel. “That’s where a large part of our efforts are aimed. I would like to stress the difference between educational apps and core curricular subjects like mathematics, and on the other hand the apps that help children gain cultural knowledge and awareness and develop creative skills. Apps until now have proved to be very handy and helpful in teaching teach subjects of core curriculum. Apps that bring culture and art to the classroom are still an exception.” The biggest obstacle is that education on cultural subjects is simply too



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specialized, Brummel continued. Many teachers have no musical training and will hesitate to use Garageband or a painting app because it requires them to create their own didactic flow. These apps hardly ever come with a tutorial. Through surveys it has become clear that 43% of schools would like to place cultural goals into the curriculum. However, only 14% of schools think that regular teachers are qualified to teach culture. While most teachers themselves don’t feel qualified, schools are still inclined to blend cultural education into the curriculum, even though budgets for hiring specialists are being cut. This presents a problem especially for schools outside the cultural hubs. FAM therefore aspires to offer high level art education to all schools in The Netherlands, while empowering regular teachers to actually teach culture themselves. Over the past three years FAM has collaborated with The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the creation of a series of educational apps. Romeo and Julia is the third such collaboration. “In the education system there is a real jungle of intermediate parties”, said Brummel. “It’s difficult to reach the teacher. So it’s very important for us not to produce mere incidents. We want our apps to be used in the classroom for many years, at least seven. We spend a lot of time analyzing preconditions and frameworks: who are the users? What are their needs? What is the technical infrastructure in schools?” Also:

What do children want in an app?

Search and images

Gaming aspects

Play levels

Puzzles

Receiving encyclopedic knowledge after completing a task FAM always puts one artwork into the centre of the app, said Brummel, as they previously did with their Pictures at an Exhibition app, based on the Mussorgsky orchestral composition, and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. For its Romeo and Julia app the company asked Dutch rapper Def



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P to rewrite the story – the original composition takes too much time – and compose body percussions on the beat of the Dance of the Knights. Teachers and students get in-app instructions on how to write rap and perform body percussion. At the end of the three-week project teachers can organize a performance in the classroom. The app is now being used in over 300 Dutch schools. Stefan Vandegehuchte: Heyhey Apps (Belgian App producer) How can you put street art in your app? “HeyHey Apps is a Flemish company that builds colourful apps for happy people, translating the world of talented artists in beautiful apps that people like,” is how Stefan Vandegehuchte articulated the company’s mission statement. It all started 20 years ago in “the best city in the world” (Ghent) when Vandegehuchte bumped into “a guy who was amazingly good at drawing.” That guy was street artist Bué. After Vandegehuchte’s son was born, he asked him to paint his room and they started to talk about collaborating. “Bué has a colourful, child-friendly style. Adults tend to call it naïve. But he wants to add color to grey places. This year he won the Prize of Arts and Culture from the city of Ghent. Dave (Bué’s real name) would have loved to be with me [today] but at the moment he’s making waffles in Mexico. He always puts birds everywhere, because he wants to be free as a bird. A lot of those birds seem to be farting. He travels all over the world. He takes his backpack, puts some cans into it and travels. He goes to favelas and asks people if he can add some colour to their houses. He’s not the artist you’ll find in an art gallery.” HeyHey Apps was founded two and a half years ago. First came HeyHey Colours, a colouring book based on Bué’s work. All the drawings in the app are sprayed somewhere around the world on a wall. Then came HeyHey Pics, for a while featured by Apple in large parts of Asia as best new app. HeyBC was the company’s first educational app. It offers 5 to 7 year olds a tool to help them develop their interest in language, letters and sounds.



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HeyHey’s Eva Mouton Pics is by far the company’s most successful app, said Vandegehuchte. It’s based on the work of illustrator Eva Mouton, who writes a popular column in Belgian newspaper De Standaard. It was featured as Best New App in the Belgian App Store and kept the number one position as the best selling app for 11 days. Eva Mouton Pics is a photo sticker app with 90 stickers to decorate snapshots. Together with London-based Brazilian artist Lucas Levitan the company developed the Photo Invasion app, which allows users to create stories and ‘invade’ photos. Currently HeyHey is apparently making the world’s first app that can read a cat’s mind and is in the process of writing cat recognition software, said Vandegehuchte. Stephanie Buijs: Fonk (Amsterdam-based creative agency)

How can you establish real interaction? While most apps are focused on solo use, Stephanie Buijs and her colleagues at Fonk Amsterdam choose a different approach. They believe that interaction between people is a core need in everyone.

Families connect most deeply when they learn and play together. Apps are a great tool to stimulate this type of interaction. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution”, said Interaction Designer Buijs. “We observe people’s natural flow and we learn every day.” Fonk came up with a ‘Level of Love’ checklist, enabling the designers to see whether they really follow the natural flow of users:

Be positive

Whatever the solution, it needs to be on users’ own terms



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It needs to be personal

It needs to be valuable

It needs to support the differences

The tone really ties it all together Science center Nemo asked Fonk to come up with a solution to enhance interaction between children and parents in the museum, because they observed how parents were often separate from the experience. Parents don’t consider themselves the ideal playing partner for their children, while children said in surveys that they actually really like to play with them. Fonk came up with an app that helps parents and children to ask questions – offering the app in landscape mode to enhance co-operation – and explore exhibitions together. The app was developed based on observing people’s behaviour during Nemo’s exhibitions. Gavin Esajas: Malmberg (Dutch educational publisher) goes digital Gavin Esajas worked as business developer with a background in user experience design when he joined Malmberg, one of the biggest Dutch educational publishers. With a strong emphasis on print, the company wanted to transform itself and started experimenting with educational apps and a ‘customer discovery process’. Building on the success of Malmberg’s Tafelmonsters app for practising multiplication tables, it led to the creation of the Family Pluym app with which children can learn online, at home. Development and research undertaken in close co-operation with parents and children showed that:

Practising at home doesn’t really happen that often, but if it does, people use paper and not software

Being able to practise at home with materials that complement the methods in school are regarded as highly relevant

So there was actually room for an app that would help practise at home. Over 100 children were surveyed about exercises and motivators that would bring them back to the app. Surprisingly, while parents reacted very vocally to the app’s visual style, the children didn’t.



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Exercises:

Should feel like mini games, which has much to do with visual style. Don’t make them too dull. White backgrounds are a no-go area. (Educational apps used in schools require neutral backgrounds but apps for home use don’t.)

Time pressure increases attention but it also causes sloppiness

If children did something good and there was applause, they would stand up and started cheering for themselves

Humour is very important

Match the skill level. How far along is the child in their process of learning

Motivators:

Levels are essential. It’s a way of micro chunking the exercise, which is actually a game-mechanic

Use some type of reward system

Too many motivators can be confusing

Really learning something is itself a motivator

Storytelling really holds the attention. If an app lacks storytelling, children make up their own stories. This is why Malmberg decided to create a whole family

Visual style Children regard it differently than parents. They use as the function. If the exercise is ok, then they don’t respond to style. The result is Malmberg’s Family Pluym app, a character-based educational adventure with a simple interface, developed in true co-

creation style. Key lessons:

Find your core concept first

Allow yourself to explore



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Dr. Panda Skype-interview with Dr. Panda’s Thijs Bosma Dr. Panda is a successful series of apps for children, created by China-based Thijs Bosma and made by a Dutch/Chinese company. In a Skype session Bosma talked about trends and lessons learned, as well as key insights. Dr. Panda apps centre heavily on role-play and reflect what children do in their daily lives. What distinguishes Dr. Panda, said Bosma, is that the company interprets role-play in the broadest sense. They basically tackle every theme form every angle possible. So in Dr. Panda in Space, for example, children can also learn about gravity and planets. This ensures that children keep playing and really get ‘the role-play feeling’. The characters and the interaction children have with those characters is essential in the design. Children play a central role in that together with Dr. Panda they help other animal characters fulfill their needs. For instance in Dr. Panda’s Restaurant two children can, in a very fun way, make food for the other characters. The way those characters react is also essential. We are focused on young children so we design with them in mind. At the same time we do want our apps to be interesting for 5-6 years olds, so there are also elements in the apps that allow for them to express their own creativity. Guiding principles the company uses:

Apps are designed to be gender neutral

Early on, the company used competition and scoring in the apps. Not anymore. Children should be able to play at their own pace

No text, children prefer images



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Trends More competition in the market so quality becomes even more important. Sago Sago’s Jason Krogh, who was present at the seminar, talked about the ‘authorship’ of an app. With increased competition it’s more important than ever to give apps their own voice, to really make it something special and not just put some generic copy of someone else’s success out there. “Bring something to the table,” he underlined. Gender neutrality: Video apps are extremely popular. So we’re also looking into animation and toys, he added.

Documents

Report apps for children seminar 2015