Making apps for kids: Part 1

Some lessons learned in the making of Quick Math Jr.

Children are not mini adults.

That probably isn’t news to you, but when making apps for kids it’s important to keep that in mind. Children have distinct developmental limitations — physical, cognitive and emotional — that they can’t simply ignore or decide to overcome. We want to make kids feel powerful when they use our apps, not frustrate them by requiring abilities beyond their level of development.

This series of posts will cover some of the things we learned while researching and developing Quick Math Jr, a mathematics learning app for children aged 4–6.

First up: Attention v. Distraction

Keeping my attention on anything is HARD… and I’ve had 30 years of practice.

This is because our brains have limited attentional resources that are constantly being overloaded by the distractions in our environment.

The human brain tries to manage these distractions through selectiveattention. This is the ability to maintain sustained attention on one thing while ignoring other, less relevant, things.

However, as you are probably aware, even in adults this system isn’t foolproof. It fails. Often.

For young children, maintaining attention and focus is even more difficult as their brains are still developing this ability for selective and sustained attention. Without a developed ability to filter out extraneous information, all the information in the environment is in competition for a child’s focus. This means a child’s attention is both fleeting and highly susceptible to distraction.

With all that in mind, we formulated a couple of guiding principles when designing QMJ:

1. Keep it short and simple

Complex instructions and lengthy tasks are a no-no for this age group. With QMJ, we catered for short attention spans through a series of self-contained mini-games. Each game can be explained to the child in a few simple steps and each round only takes a few minutes to play.

Side note: Not only does breaking up information into manageable ‘chunks’ allow young learners to maintain focus, it also enables interleaving of content. Recent research has found that practising a variety of separate but related skills in succession is more effective for learning new skills than repetitive drilling of the same task.

2. Instructions should be active rather than passive

This is one we learned a little late.

We wanted to avoid spoken instructions in Quick Math Jr. but found that many kids needed guidance on how to play when they first started the app. We thought a short, visual tutorial would do the trick.

We were wrong.

The 5 second video did help some kids — enough to get it shipped in the first version — but overall we found that many kids seemed to forget what they had seen almost immediately, if they had paid attention at all!

When we had a think about this it was pretty clear what was going on: within the space of a few seconds kids see a video without context or obvious relevance, followed by a series of cutscene animations, and then a new and completely different scene.

Our guess is that all of this is simply causing cognitive overload, and the result? The tutorial video is completely forgotten.

In hindsight, short instructions given while kids are playing would be a better option. Kids will be much more likely to pay attention and remember instructions if they are given in context and can be put into practice right then and there, rather then having to remember and apply them at a later point.

We’re currently working on some new ideas for more meaningful instructions in QMJ — check back soon for an update!

3. Avoid unnecessary distractions

Packing an app with images, sounds, and animations may intuitively seem like a good way to engage young children, but when everything on the screen does something it’s very difficult for a child to stay focused on the important elements of a task.

In fact, research has found that even the colourful images in mathematics textbooks are distracting enough to have a detrimental impact on learning.

Of course, no-one wants to remove all of the fun from an app, and if an app is so boring that no child will pick it up the in the first place, you can bet it isn’t helping anyone to learn.

This means walking the fine line between engagement and distraction.

In the design of Quick Math Jr. we wanted something that was both visually appealing but not distracting. To achieve this, we worked with a limited colour palette and removed extraneous detail. When a child is completing a learning task, everything on screen is related to that task. Animations, music, and background images are mostly limited to menu screens and, since fast-paced animation has been linked to short-term detrimental affects on attention, we avoided this altogether.

We think we arrived at a great compromise by creating an app that’s engaging to interact with while keep the focus firmly on the learning. We like to think it looks pretty great, too!

Post by Jane Abrams, Shiny Things, Educational Content Development.

Stay tuned for Post 2, coming soon… (as an added bonus, eagle-eyed readers will note that this post contains a special sneak preview of one of the games from a brand new town, which is due for release in the very near future!)