Learning by Design’s Updates

Designing Learning with Apps for Children

This marvellous resource uses Learning by Design pedagogy to organize children to analyze apps with their parents or teachers. Its focal points are language learning, values, and socio-emotional wellbeing.

A starter kit includes printed cards with QR codes, supporting children as they critically explore apps. A PDF version can also be downloaded from the web.

In the words of the project website,

The use of educational apps is increasingly common for children. However, parents may not know how to use educational apps for scaffolding children's learning. Therefore, this website aims to provide a resource for parents to understand how to interact with children when using educational apps.

Designing Learning with Apps for Children was created by Dr Victor Lim Fei of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Quoting from the website again,

The project focuses on the growing ubiquity and popularity of transmedia narratives in today’s digital age. Transmedia narratives are multimodal, digital, and are the instantiations of stories, and stories-inspired content in multimedia formats such as videos, educational apps, and websites. Examples of transmedia narratives include the Dr Seuss’s series of books, which have been made into animations and apps, as well as well-known fairy tales, such as The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, expressed in different formats across multimedia.

The objective of the research is to develop a set of pedagogical principles from the current approach to multimodality for the selection, evaluation, and use of transmedia narratives for children's literacy development.