Winner of a Gold Children’s Technology Review Editor’s Choice Award and Parents’ Choice Award for Mobile Apps. Featured by Apple in the Kids App Store, NY Times’ Apps to Acknowledge and Wired Magazine. This interactive book features a magical story about two kittens and their Dad, who take a trip to visit the Jazz Big Band. The app teaches about musical instruments and jazz music in a fun and interactive way.
• Winner of the Children’s Technology Review Editor’s Choice Award for Excellence in Design
• Winner of the Academics’ Choice Award
• Winner of the Parents’ Choice Award
• Featured as Apple’s “New and Noteworthy” and “Staff Favorites” for Education
• Horizon Interactive Awards Winner
• Best App Ever Award
How can we introduce children to jazz music? How can we teach kids about the various jazz instruments and instrument families (string, brass, woodwind, percussion etc.) in a fun, engaging and interactive way?
Initially, we researched best practices in teaching kids about music. First and foremost, learning must be fun and engaging for the child. We discovered that kids learn best through play, so allowing them to play the various music instruments in the app was very important.
Since we wanted the characters in the app to be animals, each musical instrument had to be carefully paired with the most fitting animal personality. We ran a few tests and surveys for the initial designs, and kept refining them according to the feedback we received. Finally, we added animations that and tested them with users as well.
One of the challenges was to portray the excitement of the kittens meeting the jazz musicians throughout the story. This took a few cycles and revisions until we were able to showcase that feeling.
We added two games to the app that allowed kids to test their knowledge and find an instrument by its name or sound.
The games were tested and refined until we reached a good balance of playful, educational and engaging content that won awards.
We made an effort to represent all instrument families (string, brass, woodwind, percussion) in the jazz big band.
The music in the app was designed to incorporate all instruments and sound fitting when played together. We recorded professional musicians in our studio and tested the audio with children and parents to get their response. Some adjustments were also made after we had the final big band music and audio sounds for each instrument. For the final composition in the app, we recorded a live big band. Jazz is a live and acoustic art form, and we wanted to create an authentic musical experience for the kids. This is why we insisted on recording live audio for the app, performed by real musicians, instead of a digitized version. Finally, we wanted to showcase the interactive element of jazz music with the use of the big band page in the app. Jazz music is a conversation between the different players and instrument sections, and we set out to present this concept in an fun interactive way. We divided the big band scene into sections and tested it with kids until we reached a fun, engaging and educational result.
