Update

Research, Developers Make Case for Developing Products for Low-Income

Developers and investors debated how best to build a learning game model that served kids and their bottom lines.

Developers and investors debated how best to build a learning game model that served kids and their bottom lines.

Developers who hope to build a learning game business should make sure their business plans include creating products for low-income children if they hope to make it. That was the message of digital producers and emerging learning game platforms at a recent summit on educational technology.

The meeting recommended for game developers to think about how to appeal to and serve Title I schools and other programs created to help those children. The discussion took place at last week’s ASU GSV Summit in San Diego and served as the culmination of a multi-month effort to explore the needs of low-income kids.

The research was funded by the Susan Crown Exchange and conducted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which is also responsible for this site, and included surveys of thousands of users of the First Book Network as well as roundtable meetings to discuss the findings.

For those charged with the conducting the research, the results were clear.

“I know there are many of us who feel it is the right thing to do to serving low-income kids. It’s also the smart thing to do because the definition of low income applies to 44 percent of the kids in the United States,” Michelle Miller, managing director of the Cooney Center, said. “It’s already hard enough to build a sustainable business for game-based learning and so to try and build a model that doesn’t take into account 44 percent of that population is just not great business sense.”

Neal Shenoy, the co-founder and CEO of the reading app and site Speakaboos, said his company and investors had identified the need to serve the under-served as both a moral and business obligation.

Shenoy said the company had worked from its inception to develop an architecture to their product that ensured it would work in and out of school and for the widest possible audience.

“We tried to understand how to build the most flexible architecture possible,” he told the audience gathered on the 32nd floor overlooking San Diego Harbor.

The model included, according to Shenoy,

  1. “High engagement but also very diverse in terms of culture. Diverse in terms of modeling and in terms of what kids are going to see.
  2. Easily translatable. You start with English but is it easy to convert that into Spanish and other languages?
  3. The delivery of the content had to work in low-bandwidth environments. So that could mean compression and streaming or it could mean caching.
  4. It had to work on multitude of devices because we could not know if that school was going to have laptops or tablets or smartphones.
  5. Given the large class size in a lot of these classrooms it was important the product be a self-paced platform where the student or teacher could control the product.”

He credited a key combination for allowing Speakaboos to be developed in such a way: The organization was built with a team with a strong history of delivering success products and drew a mix of funders who saw the potential for product built with this type of cross-platform and multi-audience structure.

But what translation into multiple communities really meant sparked some debate among the developers and educators.

“We don’t believe in translation so much,” said another producer in the room, “we believe in building authentic content… I almost find it offensive to argue that a cheap translation is going to connect to a child. Just by making the kid brown and translating it into Spanish does not mean it is going to be culturally relevant.”

Kevin Clark, a former developer who now studies media and its impact in different communities, said the point about translation was one producers should not just know, but really understand.

“When you translate something, the translation you use matters. Are you using Mexican Spanish or South American Spanish. For a lot of us this goes right over our heads. We think, ‘well, it’s Spanish.’ But this connotes culture. A lot of times developers don’t understand the impact of their choices,” Clark said.

Much of the discussion focused on issues of cultural relevancy and the need to create content that truly represents the life experiences of many children, but even as developers were seeking to refine and explore the model outlined by Speakaboos, those on the distribution and user side of the equation sought help in developing a list of key attributes those seeking purchase quality learning games.

Nicole Neal, a veteran of Pearson and the CEO of the newly minted Noodle Markets that seeks to create a national network of educational content for teachers and schools, stressed that those on the purchasing side of the equation are overwhelmed by the flood of content and applications.

Educational purchasers “don’t know what they don’t know and they are entering a marketplace where, from their perspectives, they are not experts so it is not very well defined and so helping them define what that top list of things they ought to be looking for is the first thing they are saying,” Neal said about educators using her new marketplace. “The second thing they are saying is ‘Boy, there are a lot of games and a lot of digital tools and boy, there are a lot of products and how do I sift through the products and figure out what it is I need for my classroom.”

Neal added that more of the decisions are coming from the classroom rather than at the school or even district level and that is pushing her market to ask “How do we give the teacher a voice in the purchasing decisions when they have historically not had one.”

On principal in the audience added that she wanted games that “real live students had used” and that has neutral assessments that could attest to the educational impact of the game.

While not landing on an specific solutions to the questions of how to develop and distribute games to low-income markets, the discussion offered some visions of business plans and emerging digital marketplaces that may start to answer the needs of millions of children and educators.