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Balloons Kids Learning App - The gameplay based learning experience

The ideology is simple, I need an app that offers both a gaming experience and with learning a objective. Because learning should not feel like a chore for kids, rather it should be something they should enjoy.

And that is where Balloons Kids Learning App comes in.

Why Balloons?

As in far the name Balloon, I thought it is better to be direct instead of confusing, an easy and catching. As far concept, we I'm always a big fan of minimalist games that offers smooth games play experience without worrying too much about what is going on and what is what!

Well I too like mind bending complex RPG games (suggest me if you have any cool ones). But these minimalist games are very good at killing time in places like, waiting for a doctor or a train. And that is the focus here, it is hard to keep a toddler in check when you are in the waiting area, for number of reasons and you want to keep them in check, but, too much screen time is already becoming the hot topic on today's world.

Yeah, too much screen time, well  we are not going to solve that immediately, because otherwise I would have developed an app that keeps you out of your device, instead we are going to take control of that.

By providing your loved ones a with  Balloons.

The Gameplay:

Balloons is a kids learning app that offers a gamified way of learning the basics, our current focus is only on the English language, obviously for two reasons, the user base is vast and I'm much more comfortable with that, however we will expand this to other languages in the near future.

In reality, the objective of a gaming app is not to teach rather to give an experience, so you cannot became a good driver just by playing car simulators, and the same goes for learning/teaching apps as well, their objective is to teach and not exactly to entertain you, although some do, with interactive and puzzle based content.

Balloons Kids Learning App, tries to both gaming and learning into a unified experience.

The core gamification idea on Balloons originate from a simple mechanics, a balloon floats in the screen, and the player has to catch it by tapping on it, the gameplay experience. Every balloon will have a "content" the learning experience, content here means the learning type they choose, which are:

List of Available Learning Types:

  • Alphabets
  • Numbers
  • Words
  • Animals
  • Fruits
  • Vegetables
  • Colors
  • Shapes
  • Phonics

And after catching the balloon, we used the Android's native TTS (Text-To-Speech) feature to speak the word out loud, now wait, you may think this is a cheap shot of using TTS, not even AI, well, we are heading toward more of this kind of future so it will fit right in, And this gives the kids the ultimate learning experience, because they are not just tapping something on screen the audio feedback help them learn (not medically proven, just observation). Simple as it is, but some more  observations were made that kids tend to get bored these days if there are limited options, I blame short videos here!

So we are gradually improving and expanding the gameplays into couple of other modes, like the classic memory tile, you tap two balloons to find the same. Unlike the above mentioned learning types, memory mode focuses on a different area, in memory mode we are aiming for visual recognition with the help of emojis, again emojis are cheap, yet they offer a meaningful and less visually distracting appeal. 

And this is to offers two types of options, one where the player has to match each emoji to its matching emoji, for example if they choose learning type as Animals, they have to match a Lion emoji with the same Lion emoji as this helps them to identify similar animals, and we take it up a notch by matching a emoji to its respective names, so here Lion emoji has to be matched with the actual word "Lion" as obviously this helps them to corelate their names, so teaching them a kind of visual based learning of what a Lion is or how a potato would look like.

And we are only getting started, so the app has only minimal contents, we are committed to improve, enhance and offer more features to you. 

So stay tuned!

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