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Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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Archive for the ‘iPad App’ Category

MVP to Test the effectiveness of using Simulations or Inline Instructions to Teach Kids

Saturday, October 12th, 2013

At EdventureLabs, we were trying to teach kids age (5-7,) to represent numbers on the Abacus. First we created a small animation video with a little story line. We took help of a professional animation expert. However, we quickly realized that kids have very little attention span and if they are not able to interact with what they are seeing on the screen, they quickly (in less then 30 secs) zone-out. Also animation was expensive and had a huge turn-around time even if we wanted to make a small change. Clearly a bad strategy.

Inspired by lot of mobile games, we came up with a hypothesis that if we created inline instructions and used micro-simulations, then the kids would have a better retention power and hence be able to learn much better. We wanted to quickly test this hypothesis.

However we had not yet built an app, so building an app and creating a simulation would take us a few days. But we wanted to quickly test the simulation hypothesis to see its effectiveness. So we took a short-cut.

We quickly (in less than 10 mins) found a bunch of images on the net, created a presentation and added a bunch of transition to create an animation effect. Then we exported this presentation out as a movie.

Now the kids were able to watch this 10 second movie, like they would see a simulation/inline instruction in our app. Once the simulation showed how to represent a number, we would ask the kid to move the right beads on the abacus. Of course the beads would not move, but we would be able to test whether the kids tried to move the right beads and hence assert if they remembered how to represent number. If they could, we would ask them to represent other numbers which were not shown in the simulation to see if they can extrapolate what they just learned and apply the logic for other numbers. Most kids could do simple numbers, but were not able to do all the numbers. Another good learning from this experiment.

Anyway, here is the very first video we created to test our simulation hypothesis.

Abacus Ignite – Fun iPad game for kids to learn Addition and Subtraction using Abacus

Wednesday, June 19th, 2013

Master your addition and subtraction skills using the abacus, the most ancient and the fastest calculation tool.

Take our unique challenge to do as many additions and subtractions on the Abacus and dodge the asteroids that come in your way. Enter the final answer before the door shuts down.

Excited? Lets see, how many levels you can clear?

Download the app from: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/abacus-ignite/id645156001

New to Abacus? May be you should try our other app Abacus Rush https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/abacus-rush/id624530261

Abacus Rush – Fun iPad game to learn Counting using Abacus

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

Master your counting skills using an Abacus, the earliest and fastest calculator in the world using our innovative iPad Game.

Take our unique challenge to represent as many numbers on the Abacus and fill your progress meter in less than 60 seconds.

While the time is ticking every second, you have to move the correct beads on the Abacus, without letting your needle fall into the red zone.

Ready for the challenge? How many numbers you can represent accurately?

Download the app from https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/abacus-rush/id624530261

Already know counting? Master addition and subtraction using Abacus Ignite https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/abacus-ignite/id645156001 our other abacus app.

Create Great Demo Videos of your iPhone Or iPad Apps

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

Recently I wanted to create a video demo of my iPad apps. So I thought, I would just walk-through the apps and capture the screen on my iPad. It turns out that its not as simple as I thought it would be. While the desktops have a ton of screen-casting software, iPad simply lacks any of these sophisticated software.

When I googled for screen-casting apps on iPhone/iPad, I found a huge number of apps, but all of them are mostly whiteboard apps, that let’s you capture the screen inside their app (more useful for teachers.)

Searching some more, helped me find a few viable options:

Once I recorded by screen-cast using AirServer and QuickTime, then I used iMovie to do some minor editing and adding some annotations to the video. That’s it. I recorded the following 2 videos if you want to have a look.

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