Games and Learning

Chromebooks has already grown to be 1/5th of all mobile products bought by schools.

Developers whose learning games work on Google tablets have just seen a big bump in their possible market size.

Google announced this week that Google Play for Education, their suite of apps and tools aimed at the formal education market and built for Android tablets, wil now work on the Chromebook laptops that many schools have purchased.

Google made the announcement just ahead of the International Society for Technology in Education, a conference of more than 18,000 teachers, edtech types and administrators (as well as a few industry reps).

“Google Play for Education started with tablets, but teachers told us they wanted to use it to find apps, books, and videos for Chromebooks too,” Pratip Banerji, product manager at Google Play for Education, wrote on the official Google blog. 

The move gives the tech giant an expanded number of platforms to use as they aim to grow their market share in its ongoing clash with Apple’s iPad and Amplify’s tablets for the school market.

But rather than stress strategy, Google’s representatives said the move to answer the needs they had heard from the market.

“Our goal is to find the pain points and untapped opportunities,” Rick Borovoy told TechCrunch, adding with the change, “schools don’t have to think device first.” 

When Borovoy was discussing the Google Play for Education effort earlier this year with gamesandlearning.org, he stressed that the whole array of products were a direct response to what their engineers and representatives were hearing from teachers and administrators. 

“If it becomes slightly cumbersome in a school, it becomes impossible. At Google we’ll all futz with our technology for a few minutes in a meeting to get something to work… We’ll take five minutes to make something work. We all live with it. Teachers won’t live with it,” he said at the time. 

This week’s announcement seems to expand on this concept, adding hundreds of thousands of potential customers to the Google Play for Education market, something developers aiming for the school market should keep in mind.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal published a piece that noted Chromebooks had grown to 19 percent of the U.S. education market in mobile and tablet computing. This as iPads and Microsoft laptops continued to plummet. 

It also aligns with some announcements the company has been making about connecting the laptops more closely to mobile devices.