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.

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

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. 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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“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.

“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.

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.

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.

Accompanying your toddlers while they use iPad apps to learn the alphabets is the best gift you can give them. But for days when you’re not around, Akzara is there to help you. Not only would your toddlers be guided with a clear voice-over while playing and interacting with our animal animations, you’ll be able to read insightful reports on our award-winning Parents Zone feature.

We believe apps should be smart. Our Parents Zone is designed professionally to provide you with insights on how long your toddlers have been playing with the app throughout the day, how many puzzles have been completed, and which letters they’re having problems with – allowing you to make the best decision on what to improve in the toddlers interaction with this app and their other learning media.

Features

• Intuitive drag n’ drop gameplay
• Interactive animation – children will always try tapping on everything, including the animals (try it!)
• The current version includes 26 animal animations – representing each letter in the alphabets
• Clear voice-overs providing guidance even when the parents aren’t around and the toddlers are sitting idle
• Tapping on the blank tile will help provide an additional guidance to the toddlers on which letter they should select
• Record both incorrect and correct attempts – helping parents to pinpoint problematic (or similarity in) letters
• Upon each puzzle completion, the voice-over will spell each letter that makes up the word
• Record the playtime for each letter – helping parents to prioritize which letters they should help their toddlers with
• Remember the last played letter to avoid replaying from the letter “A” each time the app is loaded during the same day

Parents Zone Features

• One-click button to remove all usage data – should you choose to start from scratch
• Group usage data by date for easy access
• Daily statistics include total playtime, number of puzzles played, number of puzzles correctly solved on the first attempt, and accuracy rate (number of correct attempts divided by all attempts)
• Daily statistics include three puzzles solved within the fastest time and three puzzles solved within the longest time
• Highlighted puzzles will display the sequence of letters attempted by the toddlers until they are solved

Please visit watch our demo video at http://youtube.com/akzaraapp

We believe you and your children will love this app as much as we do.

Note: We recommend Akzara to be used by children ages 2-5 with an iPad or iPad 2. We do not require any internet connection to access all features of the app.

Get it here.

Last weekend, my team and I won a Startup Weekend event that was held in our hometown, Surabaya (Indonesia). We created an iPad educational app for toddlers whose aims are not only to be a great and interactive app for toddlers to learn alphabets, but also to provide insightful reports for their parents.

The prototype was very good for a weekend job, and we are very proud of it. We called our app Akzara. (Aksara is a Sanskrit word for alphabet). We’re currently working on finalizing our app so that we can submit it to the App Store within the next few weeks. You are welcome to support us through our Facebook page:http://facebook.com/akzaraapp - our website: http://akzara.com/ - and our Twitter account:@akzaraapp. We’ll be signing up beta testers when our prototype is nearing the production quality.

But, that wasn’t the reason why I write this post.

On Sunday night, I came home from the event, bringing the iPad back to its rightful owner, i.e. my 2-yr old son. He was happy to see me (and his favorite device) after the crazy weekend hours. I immediately showed him our app and he tried it. I was afraid that he’s not gonna like it.

But, to my surprise, he loved it. He went on playing it for several minutes. Since we could only have 4 (of 26) letters for the weekend, there wasn’t much that he could play with.

Then I asked him, “Philip, do you like the app?”
He answered sincerely, “Like.”

“Do you want to play it again?”
“Want.”

I felt a huge relief. I scored it!
Then I promised him (from the bottom of my heart), “From now on, Daddy will create more games for you, my beloved son.”

There’s no other excitement or satisfaction that can compared with the fact that your handcrafts (in my case, it’s the iPad app) are accepted sincerely by the ones that you love. My 2-yr old son is not only my first customer, he is also my number-one customer. It doesn’t matter if the app flops on the market, but if it’s getting so much love from my son (and hopefully other toddlers), that has made my day!

I can’t wait for the app to be finalized and featured on the App Store, so that other parents can also share it with their children. Now, I am officially an iOS developer who creates apps with the love of a parent.

Andre Oentoro, CEO and co-Founder
Ray Pello, the man behind all beautiful stuffs we made today
Michael Elwin Setiadi, the man behind all the animations, music and sound effects
Camila Amanda, our main iPad developer
Surya Adipranata, our Customer Development leader
Romansah ‘Acong’ Koeswandy, the man who’s responsible for our social media outreach

and all our families who have bear with our crazy hours this weekend. And our bigger team of developers (you know who you are!).

I can’t wait to bring this achievement to the next level. Having our first app on the App Store is our next goal.

StartupWeekend Surabaya

Akzara.com is a part of Startup Weekend Surabaya, that is currently happening in Universitas Ciputra. As part of 54-hour event to bring ideas to life, we’re working collaboratively to bring a groundbreaking iPad app, where parents can be involved in the growth and learning process of their toddlers.

We are parents who believe that technology is to be embraced as a complement to our educational systems (both in schools and at homes). We believe that *smart* apps are possible. We believe that *smart* apps should be able to give reports to us (parents) regarding how our toddlers have interacted with the apps, such that we can act (or react) to it.

If you believe that what we’re doing is a small step forward in toddlers education, and would like to see something of great quality to come from Surabaya, Indonesia, please kindly share this great news with your friends and family.

From our facebook page :

“Mahkota orang tua adalah anak cucu (mereka)”
- Amsal 17:6

Sebagai orang tua yang concern terhadap pendidikan anak, kami mencari berbagai cara untuk dapat memberikan yang terbaik buat mereka sejak usia dini. Kesuksesan orang tua dalam mendidik anak baru bisa terlihat saat anak-anak mereka tumbuh melebihi kemampuan orang tua bahkan di atas impian orang tua sendiri.

Kami melihat bahwa generasi anak-anak yang lahir di dekade ini adalah generasi yang bukan saja digitally born ataupun native netizen, tapi lebih daripada itu mereka adalah generasi yang sejak lahir telah mengenal teknologi secara mobile. Smartphone dan tablet telah membawa revolusi terhadap bagaimana kita mengakses teknologi, informasi dan pendidikan. Dan tanpa disadari, revolusi tersebut telah masuk ke dalam keluarga kita juga.

Akzara for Toddlers berusaha memberikan dampak positif di era teknologi mobile dengan berusaha membangun sebuah aplikasi pembelajaran buat toddlers (anak di bawah 3 tahun) yang bukan saja menarik dan mendidik bagi anak-anak, melainkan juga mampu memberikan laporan dan insights kepada orang tua. Kami percaya melalui aplikasi pembelajaran alphabet di iPad ini, kami dapat memberikan kontribusi bagi pendidikan anak, dari orang tua kepada orang tua yang lain.

Jika anda adalah seorang orang tua yang mempunyai anak yang sedang belajar mengenal alphabet, ataupun anda adalah orang-orang yang concern dengan pendidikan anak, kami akan sangat menghargai jika anda dapat membagikan kabar berita ini kepada rekan-rekan anda. Kunjungi website kami di akzara.com, tinggalkan contact anda, dan kami akan segera menghubungi anda saat kami siap untuk launching di App Store.

Disclaimer: Saat ini kami sedang berjuang di event Startup Weekend Surabaya yang diadakan di Universitas Ciputra, Surabaya, untuk bersama-sama berusaha mewujudkan ide ini menjadi kenyataan dalam 54 jam. Dukungan moril, doa, serta feedback dari rekan-rekan sekalian kami sangat hargai.

Terima kasih. Tuhan Yesus memberkati.