Together with our partners at the Smithsonian and E-Line Media, we are thrilled to announce that the National STEM Video Game Challenge is now open for its fourth year! The Challenge aims to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning among youth by tapping into their natural passions for playing and making video games. The competition is held in partnership with founding sponsor the Entertainment Software Association and the generous support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Grable Foundation, AARP, and Mentor Up.

The Challenge is open to U.S. Middle School (grades 5-8) and High School (grades 9-12) students. Students can enter as individuals, or as teams of up to four students. Entries can be created on any platform such as Gamestar Mechanic, Unity, GameMaker, and Scratch, or submitted as a written game design concept document. Each winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000, as well as game design and educational software, and the winner’s sponsoring organization will receive a cash prize of $2,000.

Check the stemchallenge.org website for game design workshops that will take place in approximately 20 cities. The website also features game development tools, resources on game design and STEM skills for students and mentors, and information on STEM Challenge events.

Please help us spread the word among all the talented students you know. We’re looking forward to making this the best National STEM Video Game Challenge ever!

Level Up Learning: A National Survey on Teaching with Digital Games

I spent last weekend on a camping trip with extended family.  Having just completed a report on the use of digital games in the classroom, I was more than a little eager to consult with the kids in the group about their use of digital games inside and outside of the classroom.  Given the popularity of Minecraft, I started there.  “Do any of you guys play Minecraft?” I asked.  Instantly there were three kids with three devices surrounding me, each showing me their “worlds.”  They told me what they like about the game, and how they get tips and information about how to play.  “Do you ever play Minecraft in school?” I asked next.  Three confused expressions stared back.  “We are allowed to use our phones and stuff for 30 minutes at lunch” the 12-year-old offered.  I told him that some teachers use Minecraft in the classroom to teach different kinds of things and that they even make a special version of the game for kids to play in school.  He looked at me like I had three heads and said “Weird. Is it any fun?!”

This recent example aside, the idea that games can be fun and educational is starting to take hold in the educational community.  That these fun learning games can come in the form of games like Minecraft, rather than “skill and drill” games is icing on the cake for students and teachers.  The number of recent popular press articles heralding a rising trend of digital game use in the classroom has made the team at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center wonder: just how common is this practice?  And further, which teachers are choosing to use digital games in their teaching, what particular goals do they have for that game use, and what kinds of outcomes are they observing among their students?

With these questions in mind the Joan Ganz Cooney Center surveyed nearly 700 K-8 teachers about their use of digital games in their teaching (a follow-up to a similar survey we conducted in 2012 with BrainPop). I wanted to share a few of the highlights from our full set of findings.

About the sample of teachers

We recruited 694 K-8 teachers to participate in our online survey from survey company VeraQuest’s online panel of over 2 million members nationwide.  In the first step we asked if panel members were employed as teachers; those that said yes were directed into the full survey.  As such this sample comprises a large, fairly diverse group of teachers from across the country, though we cannot be sure our sample perfectly resembles a nationally representative sample.

Our full report is broken into four sections, focusing on (1) the “players” (basic analyses of who game-using teachers are), (2) the “practices” teachers engage in around game use with their students, (3) the “profiles” of teachers who use games with different frequencies and in different ways, and (4) the “perceptions” teachers have about digital game use barriers and opportunities for teaching.  Below I highlight several from the “Players” and “Profiles” sections to contextualize and pique interest in our much more detailed full report.

The Players: Playing games at home predicts using games to teach

One aspect that sets our survey apart is that we asked teachers about their own personal digital game play–the extent to which they play games on their own time for fun.  Next, we delved into the frequency and nature of digital game use in the classroom.  With this information we are able to investigate the interplay between personal game play and game use in the classroom, yielding some intriguing insights.  Among them is the finding that the majority of teachers do play digital games at least a little in their own free time (82% of our sample) and that personal game use is associated with game use in the classroom.  As shown in Figure 1 above, teachers who do not play games themselves are fairly evenly split on whether they use them in their teaching.  However, teachers that report playing digital games in their own time are much more likely to use them in their teaching than not.

The profiles: Four patterns of dispositional and support factors around game use

We weren’t satisfied to only compare teachers who use games in the classroom to those who do not, however.  A prime goal of our study was to explore different patterns of game-use in the classroom, including both the frequency and nature of digital game use in teaching.  For this we used cluster analysis, a statistical method for identifying natural groupings of people within a data set who vary along a set of variables.  A cluster of teachers exhibit characteristics that are similar to each other and dissimilar from those in other clusters (we refer to these clusters as “profiles” of game-using teachers).

Variables used in the cluster analysis:
Cells within a given column that have different superscripts indicate statistically significant differences in cluster means for that variable (e.g., cluster means that carry an “a” superscript are significantly different from those with a “b,” but not from each other).

To identify possible profiles we compared teachers along two dimensions.  The first dimension comprised  individual disposition factors, including personal game play frequency, frequency of game use in the classroom, and comfort level using games in teaching.  The second dimension consisted of environmental support factors in the school, including barriers to digital game use support from administrators, colleagues, and parents, and the number of professional development resources they use to learn about digital game use in their teaching.  Our analyses indicated that there were four different profiles of teachers who differed from each other along these dimensions.  The groups’ respective characteristics on each of the six variables are portrayed in Table 1, and each teacher profile is explained in greater detail below.

We named the first group of teachers that emerged from the cluster analysis the Dabblers, since teachers in this profile played games on their own and used games in the classroom a low or moderate amount, and reported fairly low comfort using games to teach compared to other game-using teachers.  In addition, Dabblers reported a moderate number of barriers to game-use, such as insufficient time or a lack of technology resources, moderate support of game-use from parents, colleagues, and administrators, and only a few sources of professional development around game use in teaching.  These teachers, representing 21% of our sample of game-using teachers, “dabble” in game use in their teaching but do not seem to be driven or able to use games a lot.

The second group of teachers, which we dubbed the Players, reflected unexpected characteristics as they played games on their own a lot but used them in their teaching quite rarely.  The efforts of these gamers to use digital games in the classroom may be subverted by the fairly high number of barriers they face, low support from parents, colleagues, and administrators, and their lack of access to professional development resources.  This intriguing profile comprised 23% of our full sample of game-using teachers.

We named the next group to emerge the Barrier Busters as these teachers use games frequently in their teaching, despite the relatively high number of barriers to game use they report.  These teachers, who also report fairly high personal game play, are also aided by their relatively strong support of game play from colleagues, parents, and administrators and higher number of sources for professional development around game use in teaching compared to teachers in the other profiles.  These teachers, who seem to break through the barriers to in-school game-use they face, make up 22% of sample of teachers who use digital games in the classroom

The final profile, 34% of teachers who use games in the classroom—we named the Naturals.  Perhaps their frequent use of digital games in the classroom come naturally to them as they are playing games a lot on their own and they report being quite comfortable using games to teach.  It may also be natural to them to use games to teach as they face the lowest number of barriers and report the highest levels of support from other teachers, parents, and school administrators.

How might these profiles be useful?

As we continue to learn that digital games can be educational and fun and what features and implementation strategies influence both learning and enjoyment, a parallel line of research should examine what kinds of information about digital game use should be communicated and to whom.  To that end, we think that these and other profiles of game-using teachers can be leveraged to understand which teachers are using digital games to teach and how patterns in their perspectives, behavior, and support may underlie the nature and efficacy of game-use in teaching.  For example, if “Players” have the gaming expertise, interest, and comfort level to effectively incorporate digital games in their teaching, perhaps the administrators and parents they work with should be given more information about the benefits of playing high-quality digital games in the classroom to lessen the barriers that “Players” face.

We encourage you to visit the full report, which Lori Takeuchi and I produced together, and learn about the other ways we use the teacher profiles to understand how to better support teaching in game-based instruction.  As always, our hope is that this work will foster fruitful dialogue and follow-up research, and we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions!

The conversation on reducing the “word gap” in early childhood has reached new heights: Today the White House Office on Science and Technology is hosting a group of policymakers, researchers, and early childhood advocates to exchange ideas on how to help foster language development. The event is titled “Federal, State and Local Efforts to Bridge the Word Gap: Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned.”

Flickr/William Beem

Those of you who follow our blog posts and analysis for Seeding Reading, a joint project of New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, know that this is an issue close to our hearts. Our Seeding Reading project is tackling the question of how children learn language and literacy skills in an age of digital technology. The prevalence of digital media today is often seen as an obstacle to promoting rich early literacy experiences for children, with warnings from pediatricians to set strict limits on screen time for young children. Yet early childhood leaders are starting to test whether one can harness the power of technology to raise the level of engagement for all children and their caregivers. They are prompted, in many cases, by studies revealing that many children in low-income families have heard far fewer words than their classmates by the time they enter kindergarten. This disadvantage can lead to further disparities in academic achievement and future success over time.

This post is part of Seeding Reading, an series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the JGCC blog.

At today’s White House event, we will be presenting remarks about a project we’re starting this fall called Map, Link, and Rethink, which will be specifically tailored to helping leaders in this emerging field.

Some background: Two years ago, with the support of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, we began to explore the landscape of digital technology. We looked for examples of strong technology integration in early childhood initiatives around the country and examined the marketplace of apps and software targeted to parents of young children. Our initial scan was released as the report, Pioneering Literacy in a Digital Wild West.  Our posts for Seeding Reading have extended that scan with deeper investigation into new initiatives and analysis of marketplace for mobile apps that aim to teach language and literacy skills to young children. (For example, see our recent post on apps, or this one on home visiting programs.)  That work, which will be published in book form next year, has been made possible with generous support from the Pritzker Children’s Initiative.

Over the past year, in addition to documentation and broad dissemination through Seeding Reading project, we see a need for professional development and policy connections. Pioneers want to and need to learn from each other, share insights and challenges, and delve more deeply into what it will take to integrate technology into early literacy efforts in meaningful and impactful ways. Hence the need for Map, Link, and Rethink, which will produce an interactive map showing who is doing what and will help policymakers and educators share information on the challenges and benefits of using new technologies. [In the coming days, we’ll be posting our remarks about the project here.] The project was hatched at CGI America in Denver this June, with support from the Alliance for Early Success and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative.

It’s exciting to be part of today’s convening to learn more about other initiatives and hear about research findings to guide early learning programs across the country. In addition to the White House Office on Science and Technology, the meeting is being hosted by the Urban Institute, Too Small to Fail, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.  It underscores the current administration’s commitment to spurring research, innovation, and public awareness of early childhood learning initiatives at local and national levels.

From the Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog: “Leveling the Playing Field for All Children: Federal, State, and Local Efforts to Bridge the Word Gap“

In 2012, the phrase “Digital Wild West” was used as a catch-all to describe the unregulated and chaotic status of the children’s app landscape. Although the field is still characterized by relatively few rules and low “survival rate,” several efforts have been made to help parents and educators separate the good from the bad, or as the Children’s Technology Review calls it, “dust from magic.”

Different people and organizations list the best educational apps or digital books in relation to different definitions of quality. This has resulted in several different app rubrics. Some are research-based, some are more practical.  In addition to regular app reviews, there are also several digital book awards.

Flickr / Lexie Flickinger

In the classification system we developed as part of the UK Open University-Booktrust project, we aimed to develop criteria to generate discussion among parents, teachers and app developers and enable all three stakeholders to consider the potential of the digital medium for children’s stories. We presented our criteria as questions so that all three stakeholders can reflect on apps in terms of what is and what could be, and thus base their judgment on creative reflection rather than a simple “box-ticking” exercise.

We were particularly keen to foreground specific engagement patterns which are novel and specific to digital books and which nurture longterm readers’ identities. We therefore focused on the reading for pleasure literature and the facets of behavior identified as crucial for facilitating independent reading and children finding enjoyment in reading whatever it is.

When we considered the research literature salient to understanding the role digital books play in young children’s reading for pleasure, we identified seven key engagement patterns: affective, shared, sustained, creative, personalized, interactive, and balanced transmedia engagement. I go into more detail regarding each of these engagements in a series of research blogs on the Booktrust website.  In this guest post, I focus on the balanced transmedia engagement category, given that it was heavily influenced by the conceptualization of transmedia elaborated in the guidebook produced by USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.

How could children’s book apps and digital books support transmedia experiences?

Children’s apps open up several possibilities for trans- as well as intra-media experiences. A simple way of intra-media app experience is app hyperlinking: connecting different apps by embedding links at various points in the app or in an accompanying e-book. For instance, at the end of the What is That iBook, there is a link to the Our Story app, enabling users to create their own story.

App cross-fertilization may be also user-generated, something often termed app smashing. App smashing involves meshing or combining features from different apps to arrive at a desired final product. For instance, if an app allows users to insert text, users can smash it with another app that allows them to also embed video and audio, thus extending the activity and creating a richer final artifact. App smashing often happens spontaneously, but can be also planned as a structured activity in the classroom.

A more commercial way of providing intra-media experiences is that of in-app purchase and subscription models in which apps can be incrementally enriched or gradually built together as a suite of apps. So far, the subscription system has been the dominant pricing model here (e.g. Made in Me) but the recently introduced App Bundles could provide another way to connect experiences.  At the moment, app bundling is mostly driven by revenue interests of individual developers rather than the opportunity to enrich children’s stories. However, one can imagine that in the future, app developers could work together so that there are app bundles based on various story themes, story characters, or perhaps even a child’s own preferences.

Another way of facilitating children’s app-mediated transmedia experiences is to use augmented reality apps. With augmented reality apps, transmedia producers can revamp static apps to take advantage of context information (e.g. user’s location and preferences) and bridge classic and digital story worlds in an unprecedented immersive experience.  For example with the Zoo Burst app, children can experience their story as it “jumps out” of the paper and interact with it. With Smart Car from Thames & Kosmos, digital content can be unlocked using physical toys (the toy car comes with augmented reality code cards which create a virtual city on the tablet screen).

I wrote before that when adopting transmedia as a business model for children’s apps, we need to be very careful about secure management of children’s personal data and transparent pricing models.  Given that developers and network producers get data on young children’s patterns of engagement, it is crucial they use these to extend, not to exploit, children’s stories.

If sensibly used, transmedia apps can endow children’s experiences with a new layer of meaning and offer them further entry points into the rich worlds that surround stories. Moreover, balanced trans- and intra-media app experiences can provide a useful spur to necessary innovation in the currently saturated app market.

Dr. Natalia Kucirkova researches innovative ways of supporting shared book reading and the role of personalisation in early years. Natalia’s doctoral research inspired the development of the Our Story tablet/smartphone app. You can follow her work via http://open.academia.edu/NataliaKucirkova or Twitter @NKucirkova.

What if we could reimagine the iPad as an augmented reality camera for kids to act out their own stories – a costume box for the 21^st century?

Introducing: TeleStory

You’ve all heard the stats. One in three American kids are obese or overweight and will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives^[1]. After diet and exercise, two of the biggest culprits in this epidemic are TV and gaming—the average 8-18 year-old spends 7.5 hours every day on entertainment media^[2]. American kids born after 2005 watch 35 hours of television each week^[3] and spend 7 hours a week gaming on phones and tablets alone^[4]. Meanwhile, only 1/3 of high-school students get the recommended amount of daily exercise^[5]. The correlation isn’t coincidental.

Beyond health, there are some pretty scary social effects too – outdoor play isn’t just good exercise, it’s a great place for kids to practice their “21^st century skills”—creating, constructing, and collaborating in the sandbox, the backyard, and the ball-field. Whether it’s assigning rules for kickball or roles in “Cops and Robbers”, communication skills developed through play are critical to child development… though the jury’s still out on mid-frag mom-jokes from frtblster2005.

At Launchpad Toys, we build “digital toys” like Toontastic that empower kids to create and share stories online. As mobile app developers, we’re proud to see kids so engaged with our tools, but also concerned that it might be at the exclusion of exercise and time outdoors. With this in mind, we set out a couple years ago to “put the mobile back in mobile gaming” – to create an app that encourages kids to turn off the TV, get off the couch, and run around outside. Instead of watching TV, what if kids could create their own TV shows in the backyard?

Today, we’re proud to announce TeleStory – the second app in our “Creative Suite for Kids” that enables kids to film and broadcast their own TV shows using digital costumes and real-time augmented reality settings and effects. Imagine all the role-play games you acted out as a kid, but captured on film to share with family and friends around the world. Our goal for the app was to design a creative lens for kids to reimagine, remix, and explore the world around them. We learned a lot in R&D and, with the hope of inspiring other developers to embrace “digital play,” we thought we’d share a few things we figured out along the way.

1. Creating > Editing
iMovie, Photoshop, Flash, Action Movie FX… there are dozens of great tools out there for creating video and motion graphics, but they’re all based on age-old ideas of editing and compositing – you film a video and then sit for hours cutting it up and overlaying effects to make your story more engaging.

With TeleStory, we quickly learned that this was a non-starter. Kids between 8-12 years old didn’t want to sit and edit, they wanted to play and create. We didn’t need to add glitz and glamour in post-production to make their stories more interesting – their stories were already amazing—we simply needed to create lenses to spark their imaginations in real-time and capture kids’ stories as they saw them in their heads. Over time we realized that we weren’t building a camera, but a catalyst for improv performance.

2. Building Blocks Aren’t Just for Little Kids
Here at Launchpad Toys, we think of our apps as the toys we always wanted as kids – tools to create cartoons, music, TV shows, and other media that we loved to watch but weren’t “grown-up” enough to make ourselves. The first step is always technical: how to redesign a “professional” creation experience (keyframe animation, video editing) to match how kids actually play and create (puppet theaters, dress-up play). The second step, however, is usually the most challenging: how to make abstract concepts like “story” and “TV show” accessible to creators of all ages.

Being Constructionist minded, our answer is to break these concepts down into LEGO-like building blocks for kids to remix and reassemble as they see fit. In Toontastic, we use the Story Arc as a scaffold—splitting “cartoons” into Characters, Settings, a Setup, Conflict, Climax, and Resolution. TeleStory, however, was more challenging. What makes a TV show? There wasn’t a lot of literature on the matter, so we decided to give kids a simple camera/effects tool and ask them to create one themselves. At first there was a lot of running around and blasting things – not much in terms of cohesive story. In time though, we started to notice patterns in the form of “tropes” – pop-culture clichés like “Alien Overlord hijacks ship for ransom” and “Villain ties damsel to train tracks” – and re-centered the app around these classic scenes and “cue cards” as storytelling prompts. The results were remarkable – just as the Story Arc scaffolded 5-10 year-olds’ creative writing in Toontastic, pop-culture tropes gave our tween creators the building blocks they needed to improvise onscreen in TeleStory.

3. It Takes Two to Tango
We knew from the start that we wanted TeleStory videos to be dynamic and engaging – flipping between various locations and different props as kids told their stories. What we saw with early prototypes, however, was a lot of expository writing or, in the words of Syndrome from The Incredibles, “Monologue-ing”. Kids weren’t acting out their stories as much as they were describing them, which doesn’t make for the most thrilling television. What were we missing?

As always, we went back to the playroom – what is it about dolls, action-figures, and costumes that’s different from what we had created? The answer became clear very quickly: dialogue. What our “toy” was missing … was another toy. Optimus Prime needs Megatron. Barbie needs Ken. It wasn’t enough for us to create a “magic video camera” with props and settings – we needed to enable kids to assume the roles of multiple characters within a story in order to move it forward through dialogue. The next week we introduced face-tracked costumes and Eureka!… TeleStory was born.

So we hope what we’ve learned inspires all you fellow researchers and developers to join us in “putting the mobile back in mobile gaming” – or, at the very least, to take TeleStory for a spin yourself. We look forward to watching you save the galaxy, track down the nefarious double agent… or create your own Lady Gaga music video (<- please! Please! PLEASE!)

[1] http://www.letsmove.gov/learn-facts/epidemic-childhood-obesity

[2] http://www.letsmove.gov/learn-facts/epidemic-childhood-obesity

[3] http://entertainment.time.com/2013/11/20/fyi-parents-your-kids-watch-a-full-time-jobs-worth-of-tv-each-week/

[4] https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/kids-are-gaming-on-mobile-devices-almost-as-much-as-they-are-on-consoles-and-computers/

[5] http://www.letsmove.gov/learn-facts/epidemic-childhood-obesity

 
Andy Russell is a co-founder at Launchpad Toys, creators of the Toontastic apps and TeleStory for iPad and iPhone. Inspired by the movie BIG and a lifelong obsession with small brightly colored plastic bricks, Andy is a graduate of Learning Design programs at Stanford and Northwestern and has worked for companies like Hasbro and Sony PlayStation to design playful learning experiences for kids. One day when this startup thing is over, he hopes to rebuild his family’s ice cream business. 

(Updated May 23, 2017 with links to archived report. )

About a month ago, we released a sneak preview of the literacy app analysis that we’re conducting with New America to discover more about the apps that families and educators are using to help children learn to read and communicate. As part of this preview, we provided a quick summary of our approach to this analysis of language- and literacy-focused apps for children ages birth to eight.

This post is part of Seeding Reading, series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the Cooney Center blog.

Today, we are excited to share even more of our findings. In our previous post, we looked only at paid apps in the iTunes, Google, and Amazon App stores—those that are sold for $.99, $2.99, etc. This set of apps made up 66 out of the total sample of 183. In this post, we describe four interesting trends that showed up when we looked at both free (an additional 59 apps) and paid apps together. Note that these findings are part of an early, descriptive analysis and not a report on statistical significance.¹

Finding # 1: Less than half of popular language/literacy apps reveal information about their development team

In the 2014 Learning at Home report produced by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a majority of parents surveyed said they would like more information about good digital media to support their child’s learning (Rideout, 2014). This led us to wonder: when parents look for high-quality apps that will teach their children how to read, are they able to find information in the app store itself about the development team behind a particular app? To what extent are parents likely to encounter information about education or literacy experts involved in app development? With these questions in mind we reviewed the paid and free apps in the sample to see whether they included information about the development team either in the product description or affiliated producers’ website (we found most of this information on the producers’ websites).

We determined that less than half of the paid and free apps provide information about their development team, and thus most do not offer parents and educators a valuable piece of information for evaluating these purportedly educational apps. As shown in Figure 1 below, a slightly higher percentage of paid apps had information available about the development team, compared to apps available for free. The percent of apps that indicate that education or child development experts participated in app development is smaller still: 32% of paid and 20% of free.

Figure 1: Availability of Development Team Information

Notably, however, these proportions are quite high if you look only at apps that have published information about the development team. Specifically, of the apps that do have information available about the development team, 78% of paid and 60% of free apps had education or child development experts as part of the team or consultants. On the other hand, only 7% of the paid and 15% of the free apps with information on the development team mentioned a literacy expert or consultant on the team (3% and 5% of the full sample, respectively). This lack of information reflects a concern regarding “barriers to innovation” raised by Klopfer and colleagues (2009) in their Moving Learning Games Forward report. Specifically, the authors contend that since there have been limited reporting on game data for educational games, the field has become “locked into commercial industry data” (p.19). These findings, combined with documented desires by parents for more information about educational media, suggest that releasing information about education, child development, and literacy experts involved in app development could help parents and educators make more informed decisions about apps.

Finding #2: Basic literacy strategies are still the most common overall for both paid and free apps, but advanced skills are becoming more common for both

As described in our last blog post, we see a trend from 2012 to 2014 toward paid apps promoting advanced literacy skills like vocabulary development and reading comprehension, at least as far as we can tell by reading the product descriptions written by the app developers. The 2012 data came from an app scan led by Cynthia Chiong that showed a focus on basic literacy skills such as identifying letters of the alphabet. (For more, see Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West). Our next step was to compare the specific language and literacy skills targeted in our 2014 sample of paid and free apps. In that analysis, our findings are similar to what we saw with paid apps alone: a trend toward more advanced skills but an especially high proportion of children’s apps that target basic alphabet and letter sound knowledge, rather than reading comprehension, storytelling skills, or grammar.

Another striking finding, clear in Figure 2 below, is the lack of differences between paid and free apps in the rates that each specific language and literacy skill targeted. Based on our experience with the free apps so far, we have noticed that many offer limited content for free, while encouraging users to pay to unlock additional content. Thus, the marketing descriptions for the free versions of these apps may really be referring to the content that isn’t free. As we continue our analysis, we are examining the pay structure of the apps in our sample and will investigate how different pay structures may be related to the descriptions and actual content of apps.

Figure 2: Language and Literacy Skills Mentioned in App Descriptions

Finding #3: Apps claim to teach 2-3 different language and literacy skills

We were also curious whether language- and literacy-focused apps tend to address only one specific skill, or instead target several language and literacy skills, like those in Figure 2 above, in tandem. That is, how many different language and literacy skills are typically targeted within a single app? We found that, on average, most paid and free apps claim to teach between 2 – 3 language and literacy skills each (shown in Figure 3 below).

Notably, 9% of paid and 15% of free apps did not mention any specific language and literacy skills in their descriptions. Of those, 20% (3 apps) mentioned that children would learn general language or literacy skills (such as “Helps toddlers learn foundational literacy skills”), and 80% mentioned no language or literacy skills per se but included descriptions of language and literacy-focused teaching activities or strategies (such as letter tracing activities or sounding out phonemes). That is, they didn’t specifically say what children would learn from using the app but did describe language- and literacy-focused content within the app.²

We found that a minority of apps—19% of paid and 25% of free—focused solely on only one language or literacy skill. Rather, the bulk of apps mention between 2 and 7 different skills in their descriptions. As shown in Figure 3 below, these findings suggest a spectrum of the extent to which apps are dedicated to teaching just one or two targeted skills to an assortment of six or seven language/literacy skills. One area of future exploration for this work is to see whether teaching a greater number of language/literacy skills in a single app is preferred, increases the likelihood of an award, or changes the app rating, compared to focusing on just a few skills.

Figure 3: Number of Language and Literacy Skills Mentioned in App Descriptions

Finding #4: User ratings vary across apps that provide particular skills

One area that parents and educators look at when evaluating an app is how it has been rated by other users on a scale from 1-5. We decided to explore the ratings to see if we can find some insight as to what impacts them. As a first step, we did a bivariate analysis, calculating the average rating of the apps that targeted certain skills compared to those that do not (for example, comparing apps that claim to teach spelling, compared to all other apps). We limited our analysis to skills that at least 10 apps targeted, ending up with the seven most popular skills. The average rating was highest for apps that offered sight words (4.26 out of 5.0), followed by apps that teach lower- and uppercase letter knowledge (4.21). As shown in Figure 4 below, these were also the two skills that showed the biggest differences in ratings based on whether they were targeted in apps. Conversely, ratings were lowest for apps that offered basic reading (4.01) and decoding and vocabulary (3.98). In fact, we found a trend suggesting that apps that claimed to teach vocabulary tend to be rated slightly lower than apps that do not claim to target this skill (4.02).

These patterns could mean several things. One possibility is that parents think they need resources that help teach sight words and lower- and uppercase letter knowledge, and thus perceive the greatest value in these apps. It is also possible that parents are not as pleased with the apps that target skills like basic reading and vocabulary. That is, apps that target certain skills may be doing a better job than those that teach other skills. In our next level of coding, we will be able to check out what exactly is offered in the paid and free apps as well as the awarded apps. Doing so could potentially tell us more about what is behind these ratings and the apps themselves.

Figure 4: User Ratings for Apps Targeting the Most Common Language/Literacy Skills

More to come…

We are still just scratching the surface of our full app analysis, but we wanted to take a break from our coding and analysis to share some of the intriguing insights we are already encountering within the data. This analysis provides just a snapshot of the vast ecosystem of language-literacy-focused apps that are out in the marketplace. We will continue to release interesting bits and pieces of our work over the next few months, and will be releasing a paper and a book on Seeding Reading in 2015. The report and book will each provide greater detail regarding our methodologies and complete findings, which limited blog space precludes. We welcome feedback along the way and appreciate your support in the mission of helping parents and educators navigate through the educational and digital landscape.

¹ You can find the description of how we determined this sample in our last post.
² Note that mentioning at least one of these in the app description— language and literacy skills or teaching strategies—was a criterion for inclusion in our sample. We plan to describe more about the teaching strategies in later posts.