Games and Learning

Bright Worlds aims to use unique content to differentiate its eBooks.

In a muddled and competitive market where awards and accolades from digital media critics often don’t lead to profits, how does an ed developer separate their app from the pack? The question gets even tougher when your market is ebooks, a sector soon to be flooded with free titles thanks to a deal between the White House and publishing heavyweights Macmillan and Simon & Schuster.

For Bright World eBooks the answer is found on the waves.

The San Diego-based studio dove into marine biology for inspiration and came up with a unique series of apps focused on non-fiction stories rather than nostalgic children’s stories like Where the Wild Things Are.

“It’s not Goldilocks. It’s very different,” said Judy Carr Belletti, co-founder and senior vice president of content design.

Their first app, Ocean Forests, launched late last June for Apple’s iPad.

The first few swipes through Ocean Forests digital pages introduce children aged 5 – 8 to vast underwater kelp forests, sea turtles and likely unfamiliar words like fronds, algae and sheephead fish (which, according to the Scientific American blog, have teeth nearly identical to humans).

“There will be people who will say there’s too much language and kids can’t handle that. I don’t believe that. We’ve got a good amount of scaffolds within Ocean Forests to help children understand the language that’s presented,” Beletti said.

Bright World hopes Ocean Forests will spawn an entire series of natural science-themed apps that ideally mix challenging vocabulary with non-fiction storytelling, 3D exploration, sound and gaming.

But it is not just hoping it fits into the classroom. The series is being built to take advantage of new state curriculum standards.

“The whole reason Common Core state standards advocate non-fiction reading is because it’s the most vocabulary dense communication we have. And in the case of children who are coming to school from a lower socio-economic background or maybe from homes where English isn’t spoken, they come from a vocabulary deficit compared to other children. And that’s our effort here. We’re trying to help those children catch up via non-fiction,” Belletti said.

And that may be one of the most unique parts of Bright World’s approach. They are marketing directly at those kids looking to learn English as well as some natural science. It is a bet on a growing market in the U.S..

According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Spanish-speaking households in America nearly nearly tripled between 1980 and 2000. Megan Riordan, a Loyola University speech pathologist, has argued a language-rich environment is ideal for children’s bilingual development with “a lot of talking, a variety of vocabulary and correct grammar.”

Bright World’s Belletti — who has a background teaching bilingual kindergarten in Arizona and 20 years experience developing educational products — said she’s been thinking about how to introduce non-fiction stories to bilingual households for years, and knows first-hand about the need for quality non-fiction children’s stories.

“I had this problem all the time: How could I introduce children to words to prepare them for school when all I had was Goldilocks? I can’t prepare a child for the future with that. I needed these books when I was teaching, but I couldn’t find them,” Belletti said.

Belletti says children have a harder time reading words if they don’t have a context for what they mean.

“When we expose children to kelp forests or any natural phenomena, we’re trying to take a child who’s maybe never been to the beach — and, in fact, I’ve got kids here in San Diego who have, as a function of poverty, never been to the beach — and introduce them to rare words much more frequently,” said Belletti.

As a developer, she often felt frustrated by the different educational standards for every state. In short, it was pain to develop for all of them, and she felt kind of relieved by Common Core standards.

It was a tough business to sell to schools because you had to have 50 products. It impacted sales. Now I have a giant market for the very first time. Common Core emphasizes an even split between fiction and nonfiction reading. I knew that their was no non-fiction available for kids between five- and eight-years-old. The supply is ridiculous, and so I thought, ‘OK, here we go. This is my opportunity.’
— Judy Carr Belletti, Bright World

There is no scope and sequence associated with Common Core state standards so when it comes to developing a trajectory of topics that neatly align with every state’s needs, Belletti is “kind of shooting blind as a content developer.” Nonetheless, Bright World is already planning two sequels.

But middling sales, budget restraints and the requisite inability to fund significant efficacy studies or development across platforms other than iOS have made the long-term possibility of a series unclear despite some initial modest but positive attention from USA Today and other tech review sites.

It’s a struggle many literacy apps have had.

An analysis of more than 300 award-winning literacy apps published late last year showed only 11 of those apps popped up on bestseller lists in iTunes, Google or Amazon app stores. The authors observed that whatever the disconnect is between experts’ recommendations and the buying habits of parents or guardians, a “5-out-of-5” pat on the back has little or no impact on sales.

Meanwhile competitors like ebook firm like Speakaboos are not only selling hundreds of titles on their platform, they’re giving them away for free.

Bright World has made teacher supports available for free on their website, including a teacher’s guide to change Ocean Forests from a simple eBook to a potential core resource as a classroom unit, story starter ideas, and Common-Core aligned activities with English as a Second Language (ESL) targeted vocabulary.

There’s been no time or money yet to test Ocean Forest’s efficacy literacy, though there’s a mountain of scholarship that shows the simple act of reading and vocabulary exposure has a positive impact on reading.

“My heart is in this to make a difference, and if researchers told me I could make an even bigger difference by tweaking something, I’d do it in a heartbeat, I just need access.”