Teach Me 4 Kids!

I wrote this app because I wanted to create a simple game for small children that would teach them something. Recently I've been seeing alot of parents in malls and grocery stores with their kids, and the kids are using a smartphone or tablet. I figured it was just mom or dad wanting them to be occupied and not annoy, so why not give them your tablet or smartphone for a few minutes if they'll learn something?

 The idea was to set up a dashboard(actually a chalkboard) with different modules that they could engage in. I couldn't afford to hire a professional graphic designer to design some snazzy backgrounds and bitmaps for me, so that's where my photoshop skills came into play. I decided to give designing a try, and I don't think it turned out too bad. Ironically enough, drawing the little monkey guy for the title screen took me the longest, about an hour in CS5.

                                     

                                         

The current modules are as follows:

                    

                                        
ABC - I designed this to teach kids the letters of the Alphabet and how to pronounce each. They would also learn to pronounce common objects and animals that begin with each letter. I tried a few apps in the Playstore that aimed to accomplish a similar goal, but most of them used horrible text-to-speech software that sounded robotic and monotonous. I believed that a natural, enthusiastic, human voice was the only way to get and to keep a child's interest. I recruited the help of  a friend, I felt that she had a great voice for what I was trying to accomplish. We recorded the sounds of the letters and the sounds of the objects in my apartment on a laptop and a microphone. I edited them with Wav editor.

123 - The purpose of this module was to teach children how to count, in a fun and entertaining way. Most apps I'd tried just showed bunch of images of a particular object, and asked the child to touch on the number that represented that quantity. This approach almost expects the child to know how to count beforehand, and didn't consider teaching them. I drew up some fish .pngs in PhotoShop and I knew that I wanted them to be different colors because the child could also learn color recognition while learning how to count quantities. I'm still on the fence about this module, and I might even revamp it in future updates.

Recognizing Letters - In this module, I wanted to create fun way to teach kids how to recognize letters among each other. I figured, the alphabet module taught them the letters of the alphabet..now it's time for a quiz. The letters sort of cascade down the screen and a female voice asks you to touch a particular one. For every 5 correct selections you receive a different sticker on your screen.

There are two modules that are currently incomplete. Addition and Subtraction. I mentioned above that I want to incorporate a fun yet educational aspect to each module, but each has to be able to keep a child's attention span(almost impossible). I am still working on those last 2 modules currently, while refining some code for the others as well. I work on Teach Me whenever I'm not working. I also learned quite a few lessons while developing this one. Mostly that Murphy's Law always applies. The young lady that recorded the sounds for the ABC module was no longer available to continue doing the voice-overs for the rest, so I had to find a suitable alternative. I tried to avoid text-to-speech software as much as I could, until I found NeoSpeech Julie. It's honestly the most natural sounding TTS software I've ever encountered. Julie's voice is actually what is in the Counting and Letter Recognition modules, and most people can't believe that it's TTS software and not an actual person doing voice-overs. Check it out here if you're looking for good TTS software.

You can find Teach Me in the Playstore here