Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science — Bruno Bettelheim
Do you have a child at home and looking for new learning ways other than traditional ones to expand her vocabularies, and help her pick up few words in a foreign language? Or maybe guide her to pick up a hobby in photography or digital art? Well, as Apple’s slogan says: “There’s an app for that”.
This blog article presents some mobile apps based on machine vision and artificial intelligence technologies that could help. The main user of these apps is the child herself. We hope you find our reviews interesting and fun, but first lets talk about learning process and creativity in kids and see how technology could help.
Toddlers are eager to explore the world.
Most of us at early age had the love of exploring and knowing the unknown, something that we developed little by little as we progressed in childhood. Actually, what we have been doing is developing our “spatial awareness”, although, we may not be aware of this term or realize its implications.
To clarify this concept, lets use an example, when your child sees a closed door, she has all desires to open that door and enter the room even though she wants nothing from there. Out of child’s love for exploration, she would learn how to open closed doors. Of course, setting that as a goal is the first step. Noticing the knob is second. Reaching it by raising her little feet could be a major achievement for one day. Using “try and error” methodology to learn how to operate the door’s knob is a big next step. She may lift the handle up many times. She may press it down other times. She may try to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise many times. Eventually, your child will open that closed door and enter that room. Raising her feet to a certain level to reach the knob and operating it again and again would be a “learned skill” on how to open a door. She would also use this experience to attempt other closed doors around the house. While doing this, your child just developed three spatial awareness skills: directions, distances, and location to open a closed door. However, her experience won’t be useful when the door is locked. However, operating a key would be another challenge for another day.
A study conducted in Britain monitored a group of 1,600 children for 10 years. At age (3–5), 98% of the children were ranked high in creativity. When they were tested again at ages (8 to 10) years old, the percentage dropped to 32% of that population with high creativity skills. The last test was at ages (13–15) where the percentage dropped to 10% who could think in this way [Find source here]. The results are scary; the study linked the huge drop in creativity to the education system used in Britain. Now think of other places around the word where limited resources are available for early education (compared to the UK), do you imagine how much drop in creative thinking children have at these places? (Share your views on creative thinking in early — and late — childhood at your environment?)
Up to this point, this article has not presented anything new other than literature review that is not related to use of technology in education and early development. However, it was presented to emphasize the effect of local environment on child’s creativity. Hence, we would like to introduce some tools that would change the environment where the child grows up.
Well, have you thought of your smartphone’s (or tablet’s) camera as a tool to help improve your child’s spatial awareness or language abilities? Indeed some app developers have. They have used photography, machine vision, artificial intelligence, and language processing to develop unique and fun educational apps your kid would enjoy.
Happy Snap — Mobile App
Happy Snap is an educational and entertaining app targets your child as the main user. It uses photography, machine vision, and artificial intelligence technologies to provide a game for the young user. The engaging learning experience starts when the child opens the Happy Snap app where she learns about the task of capturing photos of objects to make Snap “the cartoon camera” happy. Then she is asked to determine if she is in indoors or outdoors. When the child indicates her environment, the game starts and the user would be tasked to take photos of five objects. The child would be directed by voice (in addition to written object name) to take a pic of named object. For example, your child would be asked to look for a book, TV, toy, flower, and something colorful (one at a time). After the object has been photographed, the app analyzes the image and rewords the child by a star if the photographed object matches the one asked for. Five correct identified objects would result in five stars rating which would make Snap (and your kid) very happy. Happy Snap app enhances your kid’s photography, seeking and finding, exploring skills. This app is currently limited to English language and costs 2 USD in the US. More about Happy Snap is here.
Quiver — 3D Coloring App
Quiver is a very beautiful application that encourages children to color, and provides them with an interesting environment to do that. The app uses computer vision technologies such as object recognition to recognize printouts of cartoon characters and augmented reality to overlay animations over them. Cartoon character designs could be download, printed out, and given to kids for coloring. Kids could use Quiver — 3D Coloring App (using the camera option within the app) to see how their colors are magically transformed to live characters based on colors the kid used on paper. Your kid can also jump into the scene and take selfie with the animation. The application is free with the purchase feature of some graphics but downloading them has to be through the app main website (not within the app as expected!). As a parent, I encourage you to download this beautiful app, as your child will definitely like it. For more about Quiver — 3D Coloring App, check this out.
NameO App
This app is dear to my heart as Arabic speaking person. NameO is a picture-to-words interpreter app for kids. It identifies objects in photos (loaded or captured by user using the app) where it identifies thousands of object categories, products, landmarks, furniture, animals, plants, and means of transportation. NameO is also a foreign language vocabulary builder as it shows objects’ names in Arabic and English with audio pronunciation and spelling options. The app has twofold demographic target markets. 1) Arabic language interested individuals, who live in English-speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, and Australia where NameO app would be used as image-to-Arabic translator. 2) English-interested individuals who live in Arabic-speaking countries where NameO app would be used as image-to-English translator.
Imagine that you took your child to the zoo and she saw the monkeys in their cage for the first time, live and realistic. With NameO app, you child can satisfy her passion for information by taking a pic and learn words about the scene such monkey, animal, vertebrate, tree, and banana. Any of these words could be heard or spelled out in Arabic and English with a click. Your child would continue using NameO app to have fun, capture cute photographs, and learn new words through out your trip.
For more about NameO App, check this out.
In this review, I have introduced three apps for kids based on artificial intelligence and computer vision. If you know of any other app for kids based on similar technologies, please mention it in the comment section so I check it out and write about it in my next article.
Disclosures
1- Mustafa Jaber, who translated this article, is the co-founder of App Agent Center, the startup that develops NameO app.
2- NameO app is funded by the UCAS Incubator— Gaza as a part of the Kuwait for Development and Technology Incubator.
3- This article was first written in Arabic by Ali M. El-Derawi. Read the Arabic version.
