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Development blog for Akzara,
an iPad educational application from parents to parents

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6 June
Posted in Press, Update
Featured

Preparing for v1.1

Development Update

It’s been a while since we released our first version for Akzara. One of the main reasons why is because we’re working on a major update for our next version. Today, we’re going to start revealing what those changes are, leading to a 1.1 release on Friday, Jun 8 2012.

 

12 New Animals

Beaver, one of the 12 New Animals

One area that we improve in this release is the number of animals in the game. We add 12 new animals, i.e. Aardvark, Beaver, Fox, Giraffe, Lizard, Lynx, Mosquito, Owl, Ox, Squirrel, Whale, and Worm. We move away from one animal per alphabet setup to a more flexible gameplay where we can add more animals in the future without heavily affecting the gameplay. We hope these new animals can bring freshness to the game and to your toddlers when they play Akzara.

 

New Look and Animal Sounds

New Look and Animal Sounds

We also update how some animals look. But, most importantly, you can now hear the sounds of all the animals in the game. Just by tapping the animal before the puzzle is solved, you can hear the animal sounds as they are animated. Based on our testing, toddlers love to tap the animal over and over again, just to hear the sounds. We believe toddlers should be able to learn various aspects of animals, i.e. how they look, what they’re called, and how they sound.

 

New Feature : Lower Case Gameplay

New Feature : Lower Case Gameplay. More alphabet recognition for your children

New Features

While we’re developing Akzara, we also learned a lot from how our toddlers are being taught at their schools. Most teachers prefer to teach the students to recognize lower case letters prior to upper case letters. So, we decided to support this feature in this update. In the new update, your toddlers will be greeted with the lower case gameplay until they are advanced enough to unlock the upper case gameplay. After the upper case gameplay is unlocked, they can play whichever mode they prefer.

 

New Feature : Smart Levelling

New smart levelling feature, because our children learns in stages

Speaking of unlocking upper case gameplay, Akzara now has smart leveling gameplay. We have grouped animals based on their syllables and the number of unique letters in their names. We know that toddlers have their own learning curves, hence we decided to introduce them to animals with simpler names, e.g. Ant, Cat, Dog, Pig, Yak, Fox, and Owl, over the more complex ones, e.g. Elephant, Mosquito, Butterfly, and Jellyfish. There are 9 levels in the game, and the game will automatically advance your toddlers to the next level when they have mastered the current level. Akzara is no longer a game where you traverse through the alphabet from A to Z over and over again. We hope the game can entice toddlers to learn more by providing the levels and increasing the difficulties as they play.

 

Updated Parents Zone with Charts

 

Updated Parents Zone

Updated Parents Zone with Quick Look Charts and music / sound toggles

Akzara is known for its Parent Zone feature. We built this feature because we are parents who care about how our toddlers are learning and progressing through the app. With the new smart leveling, we also introduce a chart that can illustrate how your toddlers are progressing, in terms of levels achieved, in both lower case and upper case gameplay over the last 6 days. We hope this can provide insight to the parents on how they can motivate (and/or play along with) their toddlers in areas where they may not be progressing.

 

Parents Zone Reset

Adjust your children learning levels

We have also adjusted the Parent Zone control feature, where there are some features which are now password-protected, e.g. the Reset Data button. We have had numerous feedback suggesting this, because it’s quite easy for the toddlers to hit it by mistake. With the new smart leveling, we also add a way for you, the parents, to adjust the levels so that you can have your toddlers revisit any level which has been unlocked previously. You can also use this feature to restart the game to level 1 without erasing the gameplay data.

On the audio side, we’ve made a lot of improvements to Akzara. We include a new original music for the splash screen and the in-game mode. We really love the new music and we hope your toddlers will too. You can now hear how each letter sounds when you tap them, which will help your toddlers to learn. And, we also allow you to switch on/off the music, sound effects, and voice overs should you desire to.

 

Parents Zone : Feedback Form

We'd like to know your suggestions and feedback. Let's learn together.

Finally, you can now send us feedback from within the app. We always love to hear your feedback on how we could improve the app and your toddlers experience while playing with Akzara. One last thing that we want to mention before ending this article is that whenever you see a notification badge in Akzara icon, you know that your toddlers have played with Akzara since the last time you check the Parent Zone. You might find this small feature to be very helpful if you really want to stay on top of your toddlers progress.

 

Badges

Use of Badge for new data

If you love Akzara and you know how other parents might benefit from this app, please kindly share this article with them.

We will be posting 5 promo codes here that they can use to redeem the current version of Akzara, and be upgraded for free to this awesome 1.1. version.

3A4JTLP4HEW6
KTP7NTLFM47R
A9AK6AA3L4WX
WMEEMXXYWTP4
79NY7A9A3XK3

6 January
Posted in Press

Reviewed on iAppsforteachers

We got reviewed! Courtesy to Jason Boyle from iappsforteachers.com. Some excerpt from the reviews, especially on the Parents Zone.

“The unique function of Akzara is its ability to track your child’s progress. While your child is playing the game, the application is recording the accuracy, how many puzzles were played, and how long the child played for. These statistics can be found in “Parents’ Zone” on the min menu. The data is laid out in a very clean manner. After my daughter was finished playing Akzara, I immediately checked her statistics. After 16 minutes of playtime, I could clearly see what letters she had struggled with, and what letters she did not. Being as she had played the game for consecutive days, I was able to compare her stats with past days. The tracking system just works.”

We got a really good feedback on how his kids deleted the Parents Zone data. The parents zone got some improvements for us to worked on and we appreciate the feedback and will work on it.

See the review at iAppsforteachers website

On a side note we are working on another release while gathering all the input from other parents. The updates will include a levelling system and ways to have the parents zone data more secure.

28 December
Posted in General

Fun, Engaging and Insightful

Fun, Engaging, and Insightful. These are the characteristics of Akzara as implicitly described by a user review in Canada’s iTunes Store.

“I am very impressed with this first stage of AKZARA, a learning application for toddlers. My two year old daughter has received very little explicit instruction for letter sense, but this morning she was very engaged in the initial phoneme information gap format of this visually pleasing app! In our case, my daughter needed some hints to find the right letter to drag and drop, but she watched attentively as the words were spelled in front of her eyes with a jiggling movement of each letter. Very fun! This should really help her learning curve. She also discovered, on her own, that she could touch the individual letters in the animal words and the voice would be activated so that she could hear the letter names on her own terms. She showed a lot of autonomy during her first exposure to AKZARA. The sound effects and the voice for this application are other reasons for this being so interesting for my almost three year old toddler. We loved it!

Parents will love the assessment tool that AKZARA provides. It maps exactly what was done with regards to letter choice and the exact time that was involved. Parents can gauge the progress of their toddler over time. Excellent feature!

I anticipate the next stage will introduce the sounds of the letters being available to experiment with different word families and to follow that stage the introduction of three letter words with short vowels to fill the information gap. I can’t wait AKZARA!”

Have you tried Akzara for your toddlers? Don’t miss out on this great learning opportunity for your loved ones. Get it now on the App Store.

23 December
Posted in General

Christmas Gift from Akzara

Win promo codes for Akzara, award-winning iPad app for toddlers to learn alphabets while providing daily insightful reports for parents.

Christmas is coming. We’re pretty sure that you have planned great gifts for your toddlers. As parents, we would also like to share our best gift to you and your toddlers, by giving away two promo codes of our newly released award-winning iPad app, Akzara, for enthusiastic parents like you.

It’s very simple.
1. If you’re on Facebook, visit and like our Facebook page, then reshare our giveaway post.
2. If you’re on Twitter, follow us at @akzaraapp, then RT our giveaway tweet.

Spread this great news, and we’ll pick two winners randomly just around Christmas Eve in New Zealand.

23 December
Posted in Development

Parent Zone

Short History

I am a father of two sons – the eldest is still 2 years old. I’ve been involved in the software development for a long time, and been focusing on the iOS platform over the past year. When the iPad 2 is released, I bought one for my son. I think it’s a wonderful learning media for him. I install a lot of different apps for him to play and learn, but there’s been always this problem that’s itching me.

Each time I come home from work, I know that he’s been playing with the iPad, but I don’t know how he’s been progressing. Is he learning anything new today? What kind of problems is he dealing with today? How should I focus the apps that I install to suit his needs and interests? I find these questions to be very hard to answer. I believe apps should be smart. Not only fun and educational, but also smart. They should be able to provide daily reports to the parents so that they can learn how their children have been progressing throughout the day.

That’s what we are trying to do with Akzara. It’s an iPad app that helps toddlers to learn the alphabets, while at the same time produces daily insightful reports for the parents. We think this is a good improvement towards a stronger relationship and involvement from the parents towards their toddlers’ learning activities.

A Real Example

As you can see in the attached screenshot, that’s what my eldest son, Philip, has been progressing through the app. There are a lot of things that you can learn from this report. Here are some examples:

  • On the 22nd, Philip played for approx. 25 minutes. He seemed to have a long pause (for 9 minutes) on Hippo. Using this report I know that he must have left the iPad to go somewhere else and returned after 9 minutes. (This is something that he usually does).
  • Philip played 10 puzzles (starting from A – Ant to J – Jellyfish). Akzara remembers the last puzzle that you play that day – so that you won’t have to restart from A again, but we reset that to A again at the start of the day.
  • From Dec 17th, there are days where Philip does not play with Akzara. This is normal, because I install a lot of apps on the iPad.
  • Philip is able to solve 3 puzzles perfectly – within his first attempt. One of them is Ant. The other two could possibly be Butterfly, Fish, Impala or Jellyfish.

 
The Future

We are continually working on improving our parental reports, and we appreciate your feedback on how your toddlers are playing Akzara and how you use the Parent Zone to gain insights on your toddlers learning improvement. If you think there are other parents who may benefit from our Parent Zone reports, you’re welcome to share this post with them – so that they may have Akzara for their toddlers as well.