Reach Every Reader Apps
Professors Joe Blatt and Meredith Rowe showcasing “Animal Antics” for the Harvard Gazette
Apps to be Published in 2021
Reach Every Reader is an initiative spearheaded by the Harvard, MIT, Florida State University, and the Florida Center for Reading Research to help children from underprivileged communities improve their literacy. As part of this program, the Harvard Graduate School of Education asked FableVision to make a series of apps designed to target early language acquisition through encouraging parents and kids to talk.
Using an App Co-operatively
Most cell phone applications are solitary activities, especially when it comes to kids. Parents often surrender their phone in the hopes that their child will go off and play on their own. We wanted just the opposite: we wanted apps that could only be played when parent and child were together! We iterated around a number of different designs, but ultimately came down to two final products:
Animal Antics: Parents and children record a back-and-forth conversation, wherein they pretend to be animals in different real life and fantastical scenarios
Photo Play: Players interact with familiar photos—by decorating them or playing a variation of “I spy”—all the while being prompted to talk about what it is they are seeing and doing.
Development Through Iteration
Our mandate was clear: our primary focus throughout development was to create a digital environment that encouraged and enhanced real-world conversation between parents and their young children. Because of our partnership with a renowned academic institution, we were able to test multiple versions of the prototype with our exact target demographic, and continue to iterate on design until we saw the player behavior we wanted.
Therefore, unlike the traditional waterfall pipeline associated with typical academic development, we were encouraged to build in stages: With Photo Play, we originally had complex, illustrated, “Where’s Waldo”-like images where parents asked kids to find particular sections of the scene. Very quickly we realized that this design encouraged the worst kind of conversation: “Is that a dog?” “Yes.” “Where is the milk?” “Here.”
One word answers were not the goal—we wanted conversation starters! So we scrapped the idea of searching for illustrations, and instead moved the videos closer to home. We changed the app to use personal photographs, especially ones that were familiar to the child, and then included prompts that required a more open-ended response from the child. Each change in this direction made the conversation more robust!