Skip to main content

Balloons - A vibe coded kids learning app

Kids loves balloons!

But they love smartphones, more than anything.

So it occurred to me, why not make something useful out of it! 

Lets make a "game" is what I thought, because telling a kid here is a learning app, learn something. No, no, that's not how it is, at least now.

I just released the app a few days back. 

What is Balloons - Kids Learning App?

Balloons is a simple app with gamified concept of learning. It offers a distraction free and less addicting UI and UX, and a enjoyable way to learn while playing.

Then main inspiration behind this is kind of the anti-climatic one, because I was inspired by a great learning app to build something even greater, rather I just wanted to fix the experience that some of the app are giving.

And the objective is a learning app that helps Kids learn the basic of language, and basics, it was aimed to provide them a distraction free space while giving then an enjoyable experience, without any ads, not using flashy colors and absolutely avoiding dark patterns.

The Mechanics:

I must confess here, this is not a scientifically proven method to teach kids about learning, but at least this is a better way for them to learn then watching those hour long Youtube videos.

Say you want to teach your kid about Fruits, and the first thing that comes to mind is teach them by showing them, because kids learn much faster by understanding the concept by visualization, and that is why some of the videos are really captivating.

Now! there is nothing wrong with that, but once you put on a video, there are lots of distractions that happens, the first thing being the ads, and the disturbing part is some times the kids don't even understand what the ad is. 

And the second thing is being consistent, so you wanted them to learn about Fruits, but the next on the list is vegetables, so their learning just jumped from fruits to vegetables as soon as the fruits section is completed, and this forces them to watch the same video again and again, introducing the debt of less screen time.

Here in Balloons - Kids Learning App  (I should have name it better), you take control of give them enough control. You tell them to learn one concept in repeat until they understand what are Fruits, and how many are there mostly used or available.

And you can control the screentime inside the app itself, to reduce screentime.

But there is one caveat in the app, which is the color, so as I mentioned earlier, we don't use flashy colors, so it is hard to grab their attention. Because of that it is your duty as a parent to play along with them! Trust me you will understand why once you got the gist of it.

The Gameplay:

Balloons - Kids Learning App, is newly developed and offers a few game play modes. The basic mode is, a Balloon floats on the screen, and the kid has to catch it by tapping on it. 

The balloon will have content based on the learning type, there are various learning types for early learnings like, Alphabets and Numbers, and there is more advanced learning types like Spelling and phonics. Tapping a floating balloon is the basic game mode, this gives them the ability to learn by visual, and once they Tap a letter or an Emoji, then the content will be played back with Android's native Text-to-Speech capability.

There is another game mode, called Memory, which helps them connect and memorize the words to objects. 

I believe that instead of using Emojis instead of images can be a little more engaging, because emoji have become common, and they are in mostly neutral- not flashy colors, which might help them pay attention to the content rather then the colors. 

The Future:

The app is in the early release phase. And currently I'm just adding some additional game modes, that can help you learn.

Checkout the App now and provide feedback!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Don't be a stranger! Speak your mind.

Popular posts from this blog

Unit Tests can help AI Assisted Development from code breaks

Code Breaks are the unspoken enemy of the Software Development Cycle. When you are writing code for a new feature there is a chance you might break an existing working functionality. Well, this can often come from code smells, remember Formatting and Linting, in that article we briefly touch based about about code smells. The irony here is, code breaks can sometimes introduced because of fixing code smells, lets look at an example, say, you want to ask the user for feedback after they tried a feature for certain number of times. For that you may put a number in constant as "ASK_FEEDBACK_AFTER_COUNT" so here this constant means, you have to ask the user about feedback after X count, the count is tracked as either as an action the user performs or the page transition. Now, you add a new feature, and here you can the user's feedback after a different count, lets say after 10 action, so instead of introducing a new variable, you edit the previous one. This is where the code b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Templates gives a guidance to AI Assisted Development tools when generating code - Vibe Coding

Templates are a useful pattern holders that guide Agentic IDEs on how to structure the output. If I know one thing, that, LLMs, AIs are getting increasingly good at following instruction or pattern. Say, you give it a passage or a paragraph, with some extra spacing and indention, and ask the AI agent to follow the same spacing and indention, and create a new paragraph, at most it can maintain the same, after all that is how they learn about everything. Now, look at this from programming perspective, there are number of programming languages available, and each one of the has its own unique syntax, like a line in Java must end with a semicolon whereas in Kotlin we don't have to worry about that.  The key idea here is, Large Language Models, at the time of training were fed enormous amount of data to learn the pattern, and they identify them, in the above case, every time they see a Java code they "learn" there is a semicolon at the end of the line, but when they see a simi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Formatting or Linting - Helps a lot in AI Assisted development - Vibe Coding

 I'm from Android background - but that doesn't really matter anymore since the "invention" of Vibe Coding. So, In my previous post, I have briefly touch based about AI Assisted Development - Vibe Coding, if you missed it do checkout at :  AI Assisted Development - Vibe coding is good, when done right Now why I choose this title, Vibe coding is good when done right, because, when you are vibe coding with the Agentic IDEs, it generates more code in a spawn of minutes then a human can process. We are already seeing these Agentic IDEs, develop an operating system from scratch over night. In reality it would take about more than month, so the amount of code that is being written is larger than the amount code we can safely accept and understand. This is one of the concerns of Vibe coding, some talk about all the time and some doesn't care at all, and shows their app running localhost. But as a sensible developer like some, I'm also going to take advantage of these...
Post a Comment
Read more