Featured on Apple’s “Staff Favorites” and “What’s Hot in Education. Jazzy 123 teaches kids from all over the world about numbers and music. This app teach kids ages 2-5 to count and recognize musical instruments in a fun and engaging way. Jazzy 123 comes with over ten fully translated and dubbed languages (Spanish, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and more).
• Featured as Apple’s “New and Noteworthy” and “Staff Favorites” for Education
How can music help kids learn to count to ten in a fun and engaging way? How can we teach kids to basic numbers in multiple languages?
Our initial goal was to teach kids about numbers through music, and we collaborated with an educator who develops music programs for children . See the following post for more information: http://themelodybook.com/benefit-1964/
The challenge was to design content that is relevant to what children are already learning and make it fun and interactive. We ran a competitive analysis and reviewed the leading 123 teaching apps on the iTunes app store. Many of them included too many features and were too complicated for young kids to use on their own. In addition, some had poor graphics and were not engaging enough. As a result, the kids lost interest in the app very quickly.
Another goal of ours was to make the app beneficial for special needs kids. For this, we interviewed parents and educators of special needs kids. See the following post for more information: http://themelodybook.com/music-apps-help-special-needs-kid-1625/
The biggest challenge was to design an app that was intuitive for children, allowing them to use it on their own. We wanted toddlers and pre schoolers to easily navigate and explore the app independently. For this, we made sure to consider the children’s age appropriate and evolving motor skills as we designed big buttons and simple gestures.
As we were developing Jazzy 123, a main consideration was to design a learning experience that was engaging but not too stimulating. Music was a big component in the learning experience design. For this reason, we kept the background clean, created large illustrations of the instruments and added simple animations. In addition we designed an open play experience allowing kids to choose between regular number order or jumping to any number they wish to explore.
We tested with kids 2-4 years and made some fixes and refined the experience by adding two interactive games and an auto view mode. The automatic mode counts the musical objects on the screen followed by animation, music and voice for the kids. This was designed for very young kids and special needs kids who have issues with tapping the objects by themselves and navigating between the different screens.
