Games and Learning

Mobile is a major e-learning trend both educators and designers should watch closely in the upcoming year. Not only will mobile platforms provide an increasingly personalized experience, but also offer fun, gamified activities to further engage learners with the learning content.

Designing a captivating and valuable education app for children isn’t as easy as it sounds. Before taking on this task, have a look at these six practical tips to make your effort worthwhile and your app an instant hit.

1. Come up with an original concept

What takes a children app from average to great is the idea behind it. It’s a good start to think about the context for the app – a narrative that unifies all its elements into a coherent whole. Children love stories and making tasks parts of a logical plot line will help them to engage with those activities and have more fun.

2. Determine your selling point

Once you think your idea for an education app can be woven into a fun narrative and served to children as an educational tool, you need to think about your app’s selling point. What is unique about it? How does it stand out from other educational apps for kids?

You can go for original artwork or custom-made sounds, but remember that a selling point is just the tip of the iceberg. Focus on it, but don’t forget about the quality of your learning content or graphic design of the app – they both play an important role in its attractiveness.

3. Specify your app market

Now that your idea is well-defined you need to consider the possible platforms on which you’d like to market the app. It’s always better to start with a less competitive markets for educational apps, such as Windows Phone or Android.
This will allow your app to attract more interest and once you brand gains some recognition, you can successfully introduce the app to more competitive platforms. Starting out on platforms with high level of competition won’t get your anywhere and your app will be lost in the crowd of other educational tools.

4. Create a prototype and test it

Before launching the development process, it’s a good idea to create a prototype and then test it with some specialized UX tools. Rethink your graphics, check if navigation is intuitive and child-friendly and don’t clutter the screen with menu buttons of social media plugins. Avoid placing banners or ads in many places. Children tend to touch every spot on the screen and you don’t want them to be constantly redirected to other apps.

5. Don’t forget about scaling

When launching your app, you’re probably less concerned about the future than about the immediate response of the market to your new creation. Remembering that scaling is a future option will save you lots of time later on adjusting your app to a wider audience.

Making sure that all your assets like code, artwork and sounds are reusable is a smart move – they can all be put to work in the development of other applications under your brand later.

6. The language issue

If at some point you realize that your audience is dispersed around the world, it’s essential to use language localization technology to bring your app closer to potential audience. Cooperate with native speakers to develop nice description and app content.

Furthermore, if your app is multilingual, it’s a good idea to automate generating updated build with special scripts. Doing all of this manually will be difficult and time-consuming.

Bearing in mind the tips listed above, you’re simply bound to create an engaging and interesting app that will help children in acquiring new knowledge and testing their skills.