Why Design an Educational App?
Behind games, educational apps are the 2nd largest category on the app store. There is a reason for this. Tablet and smartphone’s multimedia capabilities lend themselves to being an excellent learning tool. The ability to combine audio, video and text with the multi-touch interface are a recipe for really engaging apps. Schools have introduced mobile apps into the classroom as early as preschool. Apps continue to be used in adult education. The market is huge. Career paths are no longer set in stone and people are always on the look out to update their skills or change career entirely. There is also the opportunity to target the growing number of hobbyists arising in Generation Pinterest.
Everyone is quite suited to making an educational app. Sometimes the more you struggled to gain knowledge of a subject the more you understand what it takes to learn a particular skill. What are you interested in? What do you do for a living? Are there any tips that you’ve picked up from your hobbies, interests or work that you could impart to others? Do you think there is a better way of explaining a concept that had you boggled at first?
The world of education is changing, you no longer need to enroll in college or even pay attention in school in order to become successful. In fact self-taught entrepreneurs seem to be the ones making the biggest splash in business. Alfred Spector from Google has been so bold as to suggest that technology could replace formal education. So possibly the best advice parents can give children today is to get yourself a copy of The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn and take control of your learning using a mixture of real life experience and hands on educational apps. Children are naturally curious and therefore drawn to educational apps and many successful app designers have sat up listened to the next generation and started designing quality learning apps for all ages and abilities.
This post was written by our App Design course author Chris Stevens, designer behind a host of number one apps and best-selling app-design book author.