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- 23 December, 2011 -
- Development -
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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.
