Touch screen devices have dramatically changed the way young children interact with technology. Preschoolers no longer have to struggle with a mouse or a laptop touch pad – they can now use their fingers to tap, drag, and trace items directly on the screen. When we started to develop one of our first robust iPad apps in 2010, we were extremely optimistic about all of the affordances of this new technology. What surprised us was the number of new challenges we needed to overcome to create a quality developmentally appropriate learning experience for young children.

Elmo Loves ABCs is an early literacy app that covers uppercase and lowercase letter recognition, as well as tracing, letter sounds, and alliteration. The app includes a free-play area with over 75 videos, coloring pages, and a hide-and-seek game, plus a directed-play section that has asks children to identify letters and objects that begin with certain letters. We also wanted to provide children with a lot of choice, so we put an alphabet boarder on the screen that allows them to select a new letter whenever they like.

As we do with almost all our new apps and games, we go directly to the experts—the children for whom our content is made — and watch as they navigate the experience and listen to what they have to say about it. In this case, children figured out how to play with the app immediately, but there were so many active hot-spots on screen that kids would unintentionally activate nearby letters or other spots where they placed their hands, creating a chaotic and confusing experience.

Our first attempt to resolve the issue of children accidentally activating buttons was to create a “boundary box” around the play screen so that if a child was tracing or drawing and accidentally dragged her finger over a button, it would not register. She would have to pick her finger up and place it on a letter to select it. The boundary box helped, but it wasn’t enough. Children were still resting their hands and wrists on the bottoms and sides of the iPad screen and unintentionally launching new activities and letters.

Our second attempt was to add “touch with intent” where the child would need to lift his finger and place it on a button for at least half a second to make a selection. The hope was that if we could discern an accidental tap from an intentional tap, we could provide children with more control over their experience. It didn’t work – children were no longer accidentally triggering new letters, but now they couldn’t select the ones they wanted. Rather than holding their finger on a button longer, children started to rapidly tap the screen expecting immediate feedback. Kids now thought the app was “broken” because it wasn’t responding to their initial touch in the way they expected.

Finally, one of our brilliant producers came up with the idea of using a two-step activation where an initial tap on the border lights up the buttons for five seconds to show that they are now “on”, and a second tap makes the selection. It worked! Young children were now in control of their experience and were able to freely explore letters.

Given that we successfully tackled a literacy app, we thought the math version, Elmo Loves 123s, (the sequel to ABCs) should be easy. However, when we started to work on the companion app a year and a half later the tablet market had already changed.  There was now a variety of new tablets with different screen sizes for which we had to plan. Some of the tablets were substantially smaller than the iPad, so if we used the same type of border that we have in Elmo Loves ABCs, the rest of the screen to watch videos, color, and play games would be very small. We had a brand new design challenge to conquer.

In developing Elmo Loves 123s, we decided to abandon the border entirely, and instead put all of the number choices and the directed play button on a menu that could be accessed at any time from an arrow at the top of the screen. To ensure that children remember how to access the number choices given that they are not constantly visible on the screen, Elmo provides reminders and the arrow blinks. The new design worked – we found that children were even more successful in navigating the app and freely exploring the numbers 1-20 in both the free play and directed play sections.

One of the best parts of creating a sequel app is that we can apply the knowledge from the formative testing of the first app to the development of the second app. For Elmo Loves 123s, we were able to include everything from its predecessor, add even more activities to the free play section (including a number find game, a counting activity, and 60 jigsaw puzzles), and provide more intuitive navigation for children.

Despite the thousands of hours we spend creating games and watching children engage with them, each new piece of technology brings another set of opportunities and obstacles, which, at the end of the day, is what keeps my job of creating content for digital games so exciting. And the children for whom we create these educational digital offerings make it all worthwhile.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Ed. Note: Denise Albert is the Co-Founder of the lifestyle brand,  The MOMS. She and her partner, Melissa Gerstein are contributors to HLN’s upcoming parenting show, Raising America. Denise contributes to The Huffington Post Parents and Divorce.

As a mom addicted to my iPhone and to technology I often struggle with how much time to allow my kids to use their iTouches. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have given them the devices at their young ages of 4 ½ and 8. However, their dad receives new phones from his place of business so our kids are the beneficiaries of hand me downs. Who would say no to that!

When I see my kids playing games and using apps that are actually teaching them things, I have a hard time taking the devices away. My 4 ½ year old has learned math through sports. He is savant-like with the scores he studies on the NFL and NBA apps. He has learned how to count and add, including more complicated addition, by adding numbers of points in field goals, touchdowns and baskets.  

I can’t even take as much credit as I would like for teaching my boys about sports because I truthfully believe their devices have taught them so much. My youngest has also learned pre-reading and puzzles, and quite possibly could be hired for IT-type of work thanks to his iTouch, my iPhone and the apps on my iPad.

But now I’m just as addicted, specifically because of an app that I feel was made just for me. Sesame Street’s Divorce App is coming out at a time when I need it most. I’ve been separated for almost a year now. When I began the process there were really limited resources for us as a family. I’ve been chronicling my divorce online at The Huffington Post in the hopes that my journey might benefit others. I’ve been told in particular that one thing I did changed certain peoples’ actions.

I wrote about Sesame Street’s program when it was first announced. Now, thanks to Sesame Street, I have more information and a smart resource in a way that will please my kids.

My kids occasionally ask me out of the blue, “Why again did you and dad divorce?” My answer is usually the same; “Sometimes moms and dads are better off as friends, not being married.”

As far as divorce goes, I’m pretty lucky. We didn’t battle in court, we figured out all the details without hefty legal fees, and we agreed upon custody. But the kids don’t know any of this. Mostly, they want to know where they are sleeping on a given week, who is dropping them off for school and what they can have for snack. Other times, the deeper questions come. “Why again?”  “Will you marry dad again?” “Can I have a step-dad?”

After going through it time and time again I’m now comforted and part of a larger community thanks to Sesame Street’s Divorce App which provides good answers to many basic questions. Many of the questions my kids ask are there. What and why are just the basics. It goes further to “Who’s going to take care of me,” and “What should I tell my friends.” The app answers “Why are we different,” “Why can’t we buy all the things that we used to.”

Many of the questions are questions my kids have already asked. Many of the answers are just the right wording and language I would want to use.

The best part about the App is being able to share it with my friends. If having the right language and answers about divorce is important my family, it’s just as important for the people around us.

If my kids (and I) continue to be app addicts, at least there’s now an app with the knowledge, wisdom and the right amount of comfort, support and help that parents going through a divorce need during this transition time in our lives.

And it’s time we don’t treat divorce like a disease. Divorce doesn’t have to be different. It just has to be done right. And as a mom in transition, I’m a proud app addict now.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Sesame Workshop, whose mission is to help children reach their highest potential, is learning as much as we can about these media platforms so that we can use them to best meet children’s educational and developmental needs. We scour academic journals and policy-based reports; we consult experts in the field, and we also spend as much time as we can with children and parents observing and talking to them while they use touch screen devices.

Surprisingly, there are very few resources that are publically available to help guide developers who make educational apps for young children. Much like when Sesame Street was created in the 1960s and little was known at the time about how to best develop educational television, now too there seems to be little standardization for ensuring the best conditions under which children can learn from assets on these new touch screen devices. While understanding learning theories and how children process information through older media can lend some support in these endeavors, we quickly realized that these new technologies were raising additional questions about usability and navigation that could best be answered by experimentation.

Since jumping into the world of touch devices, we’ve learned many things to which we feel can benefit the industry and parents alike. That’s why, after conducting over 60 studies on the ways children interact with tablet devices, we have released our best practices, or “lessons learned.” This document is by no means “final.” Our practices are ever evolving as we learn from our research.

Just as researchers have documented the “formal features” of television, which are the rules, syntax, and indicators of audio and visuals cues designed to help children understand a television show, we are beginning to understand the formal features of touch screen devices. We now know, for example, that hotspots (triggers that take children to new locations within the app) in the lower right and left hand corners of the screen are precisely where children rest their wrists, which inevitably means that children accidentally exited the activity they were in. We have since recommended repositioning hotspots to the top of the screen so that children will not accidentally exit the focal activity. We know that children need both audio and visual clues to help support their play patterns. We have also learned that more complex gestures such as pinching are not as intuitive and easy for the developing dexterity of a preschooler.

As with everything we do, we want to ensure that children learn from their digital experiences. To improve comprehension and learning from games, we provide a three-tiered educational scaffold (three opportunities with increasing support so that children can advance in a game) when children do not know the answers to challenging questions. For book apps and ebooks, we have learned that making the story narration uninterruptable increases story comprehension. We know that the “bells and whistles” of interactivity can, at times, detract from learning. To mitigate distraction, after the page text is read, we then allow a child to interact with the hotspots. We also believe in utilizing a word-by-word highlighting as the text is read out loud in order to support early literacy skills.

In addition to developing best practices for preschoolers, we also take into consideration the parent and how to support co-play between children and adults. In the majority of our apps, we provide parent tips on how to extend the learning experience, and also ways to enrich the digital experience. For example, we have learned that parents want tips to be quick and easy to read. They also want the ability to customize and control the experience for their child by being able to turn the interactivity and audio on and off. Parents also like being able to record and narrate a storybook app or ebook in their own voice.

We hope that our best practices report will serve as a guide to those designing educational experiences for children through touch devices. To read the entire report, click here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Take the recently updated version of our first book app for iPad, The Monster at the End of This Book, based on the classic book of the same name. Although the app, made in collaboration with Callaway Digital Arts, was tested before release to ensure that it was educational, navigable and entertaining, we received feedback suggesting some parents and children were not fully utilizing the app’s user interface. Even little hiccups can hamper the effectiveness of an app’s educational aims, so our research team went back and took another look at it. They found there were ways to make the app even more user-friendly.

For instance, the app already included tips for parents — ways they could work with their kids to help the app’s lessons really sink in. But research and analytics suggested that parents were not clicking on the parent tips, which were located on each separate page. A parent has to decide whether or not to utilize the advice we give, but it was important that they at least knew it was there. So instead of putting parent tips on pages where reading them could interrupt the story, they are now accessed from the splash screen users encounter when first opening the app. They’re also more visible to parents.

In the first version (left), parent tips were seen on each individual page. In the updated version they can be seen on the opening screen.

This is just one example of several tweaks that were made to The Monster at the End of This Book: The introductory video was edited so it could be skipped, in case it had been previously watched; the connection to the iTunes app purchasing page was moved behind a locking feature so that it was more difficult for young children to accidentally access it; certain icons now only need to be clicked once in order to activate them, instead of twice. As these updates were being made, they were also included in the app Another Monster at the End of This Book, the sequel to the first iPad book app.

Updating apps to ensure they’re easily navigable and highly educational is just another example of the many ways Sesame Workshop places our educational goals and rigorous commitment to research at the forefront of everything we do.

To download The Monster at the End of This Book, click here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog