Developing Educational Apps For Preschool Kids

By Author: GoodCore Software
Total Articles: 7
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Are you planning to develop an educational app for preschool kids? Would you like it to stand out from the rest? How do you ensure that the app has a good pedagogical value and, at the same time, is fun for the kids? How do you find the developers with the requisite prior experience of developing educational app for kids? If this topic is of interest to you, read on.

Educational apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices have gained widespread popularity. And for good reasons: these apps provide an interactive learning environment for children and, if designed with the requisite planning and thought, could be a lot of fun for the kids.

Developing a high quality educational app for kids require planning, creativity, and an interest in early childhood education. Some of the important steps involved in developing such an app are listed below.

Storyboard

Coming up with an interesting storyboard is the essential first step in the whole process. You need to have a good idea of the learning requirements of preschool kids. If you have been trained as an early childhood educator or if you have watched ...
... the learning habits of preschool kids closely, you are well placed to come up with a relevant and interesting storyboard.

The learning activities of preschoolers can be divided into categories like the following:

Learning and identifying shapes
Naming and identifying Colors
Learning numbers
Manners (Thank you, please)
Identifying body parts
Learning and identifying animals
Naming things in a house
Naming fruits and vegetables
Simple puzzles and games

Traditionally, these skills are taught with the help of physical objects, flash cards, and books. While there is nothing wrong with the traditional methods, the advent of touch screen tablets and smart phones have opened a world of possibilities for much more interactive, and consequently more fun ways of learning.

Artwork and graphics

Quality artwork and visuals are of central importance in an educational app for young kids. Characters and objects form the virtual world that the kids interact with and it has to be designed carefully with the audience in mind. Normally, you would want to go with simple straight lines for drawing, solid vivid colors and cute-looking characters where possible (exception may be cases where you are trying to display something devilish - that's where you can probably stray from this rule!). To state the obvious, big bold characters should be used wherever text is displayed and textual information should be kept to a minimum.

Voice-overs

Most of educational apps for kids require some voice-overs done. The voice-overs are typically required for pronouncing object names, asking questions, and possibly responding to various touch actions by the kid.

Selecting the right voice over is important for the success of the app. You would typically want to look for voices which are friendly and soothing, although there may be exceptions to this. Again, to state the obvious, the speaking style would typically need to be very slow and crisp.

Sound effects

Adding the right sound effects to the app help create the "fun" aspect to it. In general, you would want to stay away from loud, shrill sounds and stick with crisp and fun sounds. Using cartoon-style sounds is typically a good idea - it's a fact that children like it!

Target platform

In general, tablets (specially iPad) are suitable for preschool kids due to their larger screen size. When kids interface with touch devices, their touch actions are usually not very precisely positioned. Tablets, due to their larger screen sizes, are much more forgiving to this inaccuracy, so it's generally a good idea to target your app to tablets compared to smart phones.

If your app does not rely on accurately positioned touches too much, then it's likely to be equally fun on the smaller screens of smart phones. The upside of including smart phones, obviously, is that it means you will be able to reach to a much greater number of users. As for iOS or the Android platform, you should go for both if you have the development budget. That said, beginning with iOS may be a better choice simply because the most popular tablet in the world (iPad) runs iOS!

Programming

Depending on the types of target platforms (iOS, Android), you should ideally look for programmers with prior experience of developing educational app for kids. If the developers have worked on similar apps , they are likely to be aware of the nuances which make for a great user experience and that awareness will come in handy to ensure a high quality result.

So if you have an idea for an interesting app, take some time to do the planning and then go ahead with your idea!

The author is associated with GoodCore Software, a company involved in the development of high quality mobile apps including some very interesting apps for preschoolers.