Parents’ Choice Award winner & featured on the Washington Post’s best kids’ apps for road trips. This app introduces a story of two cute kittens and their colorful journey around the world in a hot air balloon. Kids can visit Brazil, Spain, India, Ireland, Kenya, Japan, Australia and more. The open play allows kids to explore each country’s unique music and culture at their own pace. They can play the different musical instruments and create their own photos and videos.
• Winner of a Parents’ Choice Award
• Washington Post – Best Kids Apps for Road Trips
How can we teach and expose children to music and culture from around the world?
The first challenge was to choose which countries to represent in the app. This was not an easy task since there are so many cultures and sub cultures around the world. Through surveys and interviews with parents, kids and educators, we carefully selected 10 countries from 6 continents to feature in the app.
We made an effort to represent various instrument families (string, brass, woodwind, percussion etc.) in each country. For example, Spain includes a string instrument (flamenco guitar), brass instrument (trumpet), and percussion instrument (cajon).
For each country, we introduced a musical composition that included its main instruments. We wanted the background music for each country to set the mood and represent the culture of the country. In order for the kids to be engaged, we added an ability for them to interact and play with the various musical instruments. After researching and preliminary testing, we added an ability to tap the instruments to play the music. The background music had to serve as a stage for the melodic instruments so when the kids tapped on an instrument, the melody played would represent the instrument at its best. The sound design incorporated all the instruments, so when played together by the user they would sound like one musical piece. We worked with experienced professional musicians and recorded them live in our studio.
With initial testing, we noticed it was not enough to show the musical instruments in order for the kids to learn about them. They wanted to know how the instruments work. This is why we animated the animal characters, allowing users to see how each instrument is played.
Our next challenge was how to present the content in a fun and interactive way. We wanted kids to be able to jam with the musical instruments in free form, with simple basic rules. Through research, we found that younger kids (4-8) like to break rules and test limits. They enjoy being given the ability to create something of their own. This led us to add a “create” section in the app, where we allowed the kids to drag and drop musical instruments, animal characters and various items to the stage. Users were able to tap and interact with the characters, and create their own sounds and music. They could save their creations as an image or a video.
The videos and images that kids created in the app can be saved in the travel book, which is essentially an interactive album. Through additional research, we learned that kids are highly motivated to complete tasks by collecting all collectable items. By adding images and videos to the travel book, the kids were now motivated to visit all 10 countries and create their own content to be placed in the travel book.
We carefully selected characteristic items, monuments, dishes, animals, fruits, vegetables and plants that represented each country best. We started by adding each country’s national plant or animal. Next, we conducted an online research which helped us to create a list of highlights which we then tested by showing the the items to kids, parents and teachers. Finally, we refined our list as the items were shown to boys and girls of relevant ages. We wanted to make sure the animal characters are gender neutral so both boys and girls can relate to them.
After illustrating all items from a specific country, we showed them to a few natives from that country. We wanted to make sure that the culture was authentically displayed through the look and feel of the illustrations, animations, sounds and functions, and that we were not offending anyone.
It was important for us that the users will get an immersed experience of the local culture as they were visiting each country. We wanted kids to relate to different cultures and get an understanding of their clothing, landscape, food and music. We tested each country and made constant changes to find the perfect combinations. Finding the best display for each country, with relatable characters, allowed kids to get a deeper learning experience.
Finally, we added a quiz section with ten questions for each country. Users can take the quiz and send results to their teachers or parents. We worked with educators and home schoolers to design the quiz section.
