Update

Kiko Labs Models Thinking Time App on Adult Brain Trainers

Kiko Labs doesn’t want to teach your kids their ABCs or basic math. It has bigger ambitions than that.

The company, that launched its first major app last week, aims to help children be better learners for the rest of their lives.

There are a lot of games out there, said Kiko Labs founder Grace Wardhana, but when the experienced game developer assessed the market, she said she found “none of them were focused purely on cognitive science.”

That means, few of the games she saw in the app store aimed to tech kids “strong foundational skills.”

“We want to help the parent who is asking themselves ‘How do I help my child improve her memory or focus better or essentially be a better learner,’” she said on launch day.

The answer, she and her colleagues hope, is Kiko’s Thinking Time.

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Kiko Labs worked with a group of neuroscientists to develop the game and one of them welcomed the final product as a real mix of cognitive science and game design.

“Kiko’s Thinking Time gives kids training wheels to practice critical skills like working memory and reasoning. It does this by providing a structured environment, and by designing progression in a rigorous, hierarchical way,” Dr. Jenny Thomson, neuroscientist and former associate professor at Harvard, said in a release.

Wardhana said her team did quite a bit of neuroscience research before assembling a rough prototype.

“It was nerve-wracking to take an idea to a scientist,” she said, but added that their endorsement of the idea was “awesome validation.”

The prototyping was a key part of the process of connecting to the science and the game, she said, saying it helped encourage scientists to get involved. If other developers are considering reaching out to researchers, she advised, ”I think that it’s always easier to say ‘yes’ when they see you have done your homework and they liked the fact it balanced the exercises with the fun of a game.”

The science behind their work is a big part of what Wardhana hopes will differentiate Thinking Time from other apps. A quick look at the site and one finds a whole section devoted to the science behind the game and Kiko Labs has included more in the app itself that helps parents understand the cognitive skills that the app hopes to teach.

But within the game is a scientifically based cognitive brain training program. And that reality – that Kiko’s Thinking Time is more like Elevate than MathBlasters – informed the design and monetization plan for the final app.

The developers are making the app available for free, but have a subscription model built in that allows parents to sign up for monthly new games. The subscription, which costs $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year, is a different model of monetization from most kids games, but Wardhana points out it is has precedence.

“We spent a lot of time looking at kids games and games for grown-ups and we found our app was a lot like other cognitive training games like Luminosty, Fit Brain and last year’s Elevate,” she said, adding that the subscription model essentially paralleled the idea of a gym membership for a mental workout.

That model has worked well at the adult level where Luminosity has attracted 60 million members in 180 countries and Elevate that won app of the year in 2014 and has been downloaded 5 million times

There are also echoes of the kind of thinking we heard last year from Toca Boca when their CEO Bjorn Jeffrey said they approach the app store based on a brand rather than a specific game, saying it is “akin to how an uncle or an auntie are like, “I’ll buy something from Lego. That will be great.” What in the Lego catalogue is almost less important. It’s more like Lego is normally good. That’s a safe bet… I can trust it.”

But Wardhana hopes there is at least one key difference.

“Let’s say we chose a Toca Boca model and we launch a 2.99 or a 1.99 app, we would need to develop a plan around each app,” she said. Instead they have essentially formalized a release schedule and the subscription model means they will “not have to market each new game as a separate app.”

These new games will be delivered to premium subscribers once a month and will be a part of the Thinking Time game.

Of course, that means the small team at Kiko Labs are now committed to producing a new node each month, but Wardhana is not worried about meeting these rolling deadlines. First, they made sure they were well along on a the first few new games, but she added the new launches allow them to develop “variations on the core skills we want kids to take away from the app” including experiments with testing children’s ability to remember and tell the differences between sounds and pictures.

Last year we spent a lot of time with Kiko Labs when it was developing Thinking Time at the co.lab game accelerator. At the time, Wardhana said they had a clear audience in mind.

“We see early adopters as parents who are either motivated to seek out new and cutting edge products for their children – the so-called analytical or managerial parent – or parents of children with special needs,” Wardhana added. “ We’ve received lots of great, heartwarming feedback from parents of autistic children saying that they love Thinking Time and find that their children are making progress with their cognitive skills with it.”

Now it’s time to see if they can attract more parents to subscribe to the service.