(Kate says: “I hugely admire the writing and illustration of Alex T Smith, a couple of whose books I had the pleasure of publishing when I was at Scholastic. We’ve remained Twitter friends, and, when he tweeted about how his younger nephew’s attention span had, he felt, increased through exposure to Nosy Crow’s iPad apps, I asked him to expand on the thought, and this guest blog post was the result. There isn’t solid evidence about the impact of iPad apps on children’s development, concentration and/or literacy. Lisa Guernsey has spoken about them in the epilogue to her book, Screen Time (which you can download from her website, and I hope that Joanna McPake and Lydia Plowman of the Universities of Strathclyde and Stirling will extend their research (which I mentioned in this blog post though the links to the Seven Myths doesn’t work any longer, I see) into this area. In the meantime, all we have is personal stories. This is a lovely, individual one. Thank you, Alex.”)
I love being an uncle. I’ve even invented a word for the times I am left in charge of my two nephews: “uncling”. I think it’s a useful word to describe all the things I do with them – playing games, building dens, drawing (everything and anything) on demand, wiping noses… and, of course, battling boredom.
When my niece was little (she’s now a very glamorous 14 year-old) she was really easy to amuse. Should boredom strike, you could just plonk a book into her hands, or arm her with a pile of card, some glue and a pot of glitter, and she would be entertained for hours.
Big Nephew (now seven) was pretty much the same. From a very young age he could be entertained with a pile of books. He spent ages looking at the pictures and finding all the details hidden in them. What’s more, he could, and still can, (Proud Uncle alert) spend ages writing and illustrating his own beautiful, stapled picture books or making up brilliantly complicated and imaginative games (often involving aliens and/or dragons depending on whether he is a space man or a knight at the time).
Then Little Nephew arrived.
Little Nephew is now three and, like his siblings, he is (if you’ll allow me another Proud Uncle moment) very bright, fantastically imaginative and hilariously funny. He is also, and I say this in the nicest way, completely and utterly bonkers. After spending time with him I find myself exhausted, not only from laughing so much, but also from trying to keep up with the way his brain works. There is apparently a gorilla who lives in the attic at my parents’ house who tap-dances crossly on the floorboards if Little Nephew has to brave the stairs alone. When his parents check in on him after his bedtime, he can often be found sprawled across his bed in a completely different set of clothes from the pyjamas he was put into a few hours earlier: he was once found wearing swimming goggles, with a well-packed rucksack, a coat stuffed up his pyjama top, and a toy sword down his pyjama trousers – prepared, it would seem, for all the possible night-time eventualities and adventures that he could imagine.
While all of this is as lovely as it is funny, he isn’t exactly easy to entertain. He simply did not seem to have any sort of concentration span. You’d show him a book… and he’d race through the pages and zip off to do something else. You’d give him some paper… and he’d draw a squiggle then hop down from the table and get started on something new elsewhere. Getting him to do anything for more than a few seconds was really difficult and tiring, and he sometimes seemed frustrated too.
Then we had a breakthrough: the iPad!
When my parents bought their iPad, I got them to download some of the Nosy Crow apps as I thought they would be interested in them as they had both been teachers and are both bookworms. They were very impressed not only with the stories and the artwork, but also with the ways the iPad enhanced the texts and allowed the child reader (or in this case my parents!) to explore the story at their own pace.
It wasn’t long before the iPad was spotted by two pairs of beady eyes: the Nephews leapt onto it like hungry beasties. Big Nephew typically found his way around in no time, but what really surprised us all was how interested Little Nephew became. He sat flicking through the ‘pages’ and using his little fingers to make the three little pigs hop about and talk. He loved the ballroom dancing sequence in Cinderella and Bizzy Bear on the Farm is, I think, one of his very favourite things.
He now sits for sustained periods of time reading and playing with the Nosy Crow apps and really enjoys himself. I could say that through the iPad and its various apps his concentration span has increased, but actually what seems to have happened is that his ability to concentrate has appeared. And his fine motor skills have really improved too!
From reading the book apps, he has gone on to spend time creating mini-masterpieces in a painting app and learned to play games on the iPad too.
But the most curious thing is that since learning to enjoy the Nosy Crow apps, he has become really interested in print books. He regularly snuggles up beside one of us with a pile of books and wants each book read to him s-l-o-w-l-y giving him plenty of time to enjoy looking at the illustrations. He has also developed a real interest in creating non-digital artwork. Whereas before the best you could hope for was a blob quickly scrawled on a piece of paper, he now likes drawing funny little blob people who have their arms and legs on sideways and can sit happily glueing and sticking for ages.
I started thinking about this today whilst listening to a discussion on Radio 4’s You and Yours programme about whether all the technology today is damaging children. I tuned in mainly because I love listening to the crazy people who phone radio stations. One woman today wanted to ban and/or uninvent both TV and the Internet because she felt they were a bad influence and unhelpful! But after laughing at that, I got properly interested in the discussion. There was a lot of talk about how playing games on their computers can actually equip children with lots of skills they will need in the future careers. There were also testimonials from proud parents saying that their square-eyed, computer-game-playing child had grown up and been able to put their skills to use, not only in the games industry, but in a wide range of jobs, many of which you wouldn’t immediately associate with playing on an xBox.
I know that there’s a lot of anxiety as to whether, with the arrival of eBooks and apps, we will see the traditional children’s book becoming a thing of the past. There’s a worry that children born today will grow up not knowing how to read properly or know what a ‘real book’ is. Personally I don’t think that will happen. In the case of Little Nephew, modern technology (and Nosy Crow’s beautiful apps) have really grabbed his interest and actually led him from the screen to the page. I think with careful parenting (and uncling!) there is room for both apps and paper books in the world and they can be used to help children who struggle initially to connect with literature to learn to love books both ‘real’ and electronic.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a tap-dancing gorilla in the attic to deal with…
From today, we’ve dropped the price of our Cinderella app to just $5.99/ €4.99/ £3.99 – it now costs the same as our other 3D Fairytale app, The Three Little Pigs.
You can find Cinderella on iTunes here – if you enjoy it, please consider leaving a review on the app store!
The Parents’ Choice Awards are the oldest nonprofit program created to recognise quality children’s media in the USA. There are several tiered award levels, and the criteria for the gold award are “the highest production standards, universal human values and a unique, individual quality that pushes the product a notch above others.”
Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs received the awards in the Mobile Apps category.
“Oh that Nosy Crow! They’ve gone and recreated the Three Little Pigs as you’ve not seen them before. Each piglet has more personality than ever; Mom and Dad can’t wait for their nest to be empty, the eldest boy is a nervous wreck, the girl appears worried but holds her pocketbook like the queen, and the youngest can’t wait to get started on his adventure … Charming to the core.”
“This interactive edition of the traditional fairy-godmother version of Cinderella is irresistibly cute. Most children who approach the game will already know the story, but this will in no way limit their delight at seeing the story play out with child-like protagonists and characters that respond to prodding with flips, giggles, retorts, or expressions of the characters’ own delights and sorrows … The animation is skillful and artistic, more visually appealing than many of the print versions of the story … The price of the application is higher than most children’s apps, but it is comparable to that of a paperback picture book and lower than many e-books. The humor and style will appeal to adults and children alike, making this purchase entirely worthwhile.
…And she also added the following wonderful note to her review:
“My 6-year-old daughter could hardly wait to return to this book night after night. I never tired of the app myself, and even my 12-year-old daughter and my 10-year-old son clamored for turns playing. This was by far a runaway hit!”
So, thank you, Parents’ Choice – we hope we’ll continue making apps that meet the same high standards!
We blogged about it yesterday, but here’s a little reminder – to celebrate World Book Day (which has the Twitter hashtag #WBD2012) we’ve dropped the price of ALL of our apps to just £0.69/ $0.99/ €0.79 for one day!
The apps can be found on iTunes with the following links:
Find Cinderella on iTunes here
Find The Three Little Pigs on iTunes here
Find Bizzy Bear on the Farm on iTunes here
Pip and Posy, by World Book Day illustrator Axel Scheffler
Tomorrow is World Book Day, and in over 100 countries the importance of reading and literacy will be celebrated in schools, libraries, bookshops and public spaces. We’ve decided to celebrate, too – with a very special sale on our apps. For one day only, every Nosy Crow app will be available on iTunes for just $0.99/ £0.69/ €0.79 on March 1st in honour of World Book Day.
In the past, Kate has blogged about what we think apps mean for children’s literacy. That’s why we’ve chosen to celebrate WBD with this promotion – we think our apps are valuable, authentic reading experiences and this way, they’ll be available to even more people. If you already have one of the and enjoyed it a lot, why not gift it (we blogged last year with instructions on how to gift an app) to someone who hasn’t tried it before?
Find Cinderella on iTunes here
Find The Three Little Pigs on iTunes here
Find Bizzy Bear on the Farm on iTunes here
We’d already published one app, and that was The Three Little Pigs. The story of The Three Little Pigs is one of danger and destruction and drama, and we used the interactive features of the iPad to enhance these: the most obvious example is that we enabled the child to help the wolf huff and puff the first two houses down.
Cinderella, though, is a story about different things: hard work, transformation and love. We emphasised the idea of hard work by enabling the child to help Cinderella with her various chores. We used touch screen interactivity to enable the child to make the various transformations happen… and we were left with the question of love.
I have two girls, who were as princess- and fairy-obsessed as the next child, and I found two things about the Cinderella story a challenge: the first is that she’s passive, and the second is that the prince falls in love with her when she’s looking “right”: all dressed up in a ball gown.
In this app, we were keen to stick with the traditional story, so there wasn’t much we could do about the inherent passivity of Cinderella: in our app, as in most versions of the stories, she’s pushed around by her stepsisters and stepmother; she’s transformed by her fairy godmother; and she’s chosen by the prince. We did, though, have Cinderella answer back to her stepsisters and stepmother, and we had her initiate the final trying on of the shoe. At the end, she’s shown in Converse-style trainers playing table tennis against her spouse.
But, as a parent of girls (now older), I also felt a bit squirmy about the idea that Cinderella is chosen just on the basis of how she looks. We played with the idea of appearance by introducing various mirrors in which the reader can see themselves. The vanity of the red-haired sister is contrasted with Cinderella’s various statements about the party and the prince: “I bet the prince doesn’t care what people look like”; “All this silly fuss about clothes!” and “Aren’t parties just about having fun?” for example.
None of the prince’s responses to Cinderella are about how pretty she looks. When she arrives, he says, “She has a very friendly smile”. And when they dance together, he says things like, “You’re a jolly good dancer”; “I don’t feel shy with you”;“You seem terribly kind”. We tried, throughout, to make them feel equal to one another.
I was also aware that we’d chosen to use children’s voices in our narration/dramatisation, and our characters – and this was deliberate – don’t look quite like adults or quite like children. This meant that we didn’t want anything too smoochy or sexualised in our portrayal of the relationship. We felt that this was an app for children much too young to really understand the concept of romantic love or sexual attraction, so we made Cinderella and the prince’s relationship about companionship more than anything else.
I am not saying for a moment that ours is a “feminist” version of Cinderella (though there would be nothing wrong with that). We chose to stick pretty much to a traditional story (and I could write a whole other blog post about the importance of traditional fairy tales), but we did think hard about how we presented romantic love.
I just thought that you might be interested to know that on Valentine’s Day.
Cinderella has won several awards. People, from children and parents to teachers of children with special needs and speech therapists, love it.
The awards recognise the best-in-class across twelve categories of book apps, eBooks and enhanced eBooks. Cinderella won in the Juvenile App category, and Kate was in New York to accept the award last night – she tweeted a picture of it here.
Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager for Digital Book World, said “Well-designed ebooks and apps are not just beneficial to a publisher’s brand – they are essential to a publisher’s business. When publishers surprise and delight their readers, they gain advocates who will talk about, recommend, and discover more of their quality work. We are proud to honor this year’s winners because each demonstrates excellence that inspires creators and readers alike.”
The apps’ success is entirely down to your support – so please, vote for your favourite at http://bestappever.com/v/kded to help us be in with a chance of winning!
It’s been a busy day for our Cinderella app – as well as landing on the front page of Apple’s Apps for Kids store, we’re thrilled to announce that Cinderella has won a KAPi award for Best Children’s eBook.
The KAPi awards – created by Children’s Technology Review and Living in Digital Times – recognize the most innovative games, software, devices and apps for educating, entertaining and communicating with today’s connected children. The 13 judges for this year’s KAPi Awards are respected journalists and children’s interactive media publishers who reviewed 635 children’s technology products released in the past 12 months.
“This year’s jurors had a big job as they sorted through some impressive products,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review. “The winners accurately reflect the maturation of movement and touch-based platforms.”
“We are raising a generation of always-on digital kids. From e-books to Facebook, the KAPi Awards recognize the best products for a new generation,” said Robin Raskin, founder of Living in Digital Times.
Kate said: “Children and parents have told us how much they love our Cinderella children’s story book app, and it’s immensely gratifying that such a distinguished, knowledgeable and child-focused panel of judges has recognized Cinderella as well.”
Just in time for the release of our brand new Bizzy Bear on the Farm app, Cinderella, our second 3D fairytale app, is now on the front page of the “Apps for Kids” section of the iTunes App Store in the US. We’re really happy with the recognition it’s received all over the world, and it’s in excellent company here, alongside Sesame Street and Bartleby’s Book of Buttons.
So, thank you once again to everyone who’s bought the app and enjoyed it so much!
Last week, Neil Gaiman joined a very exclusive group of writers, whose number include Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen and J.K. Rowling: they’ve all been animated on The Simpsons.
Gaiman guest-stars (as himself) in the latest episode, whose plot absorbs so many layers of irony and ludicrous happenings that it truly defies synopsis, but here goes: after watching an animatronic dinosaur show, Bart and Homer come upon a plan to launch a “book heist” (the cognitive leap between cause and effect here is beyond my powers of explanation) – they will write, along with a crack team (and Gaiman, who fetches sandwiches), a new series of YA novels cynically capitalising on every recent trend (vampires, orphans, schools of magic), publish under a pseudonym, and make millions (naturally).
Initally a satire of churned-out, money-spinning franchises (and an Ocean’s Eleven spoof), the episode eventually morphs into a parody of the entire literary and YA establishment. And, despite being a bit all over the place, plot-wise, it has a lot of interesting things to say about authorship.
It’s absolutely spot-on in identifying the natural tendency towards disapproval so many people seem to feel toward collectively-written texts, and challenges it with real feeling (as it should, given that this is the means by which episodes of The Simpsons are written) – by the end, Bart and Homer feel authentic pride for their creation, and Lisa, who in a fit of pique vows to right her own, “legitimate” novel, has not penned a single word (there are some truly great author-procrastination gags). Kate, in an earlier blogpost, mentioned Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, in the context of The Gruffalo being the same on every reading, but the theory applies here, to: is who writes a book important?
For us, collaboration to one degree or another is often essential in the creative process – either in the case of picture books like Hubble Bubble, Granny Trouble or The Baby that Roared, which have different authors and illustrators combining their separate artistic visions, or our Mega Mash-Up books, which are jointly created by the brilliant, inspiring partnership of Nikalas Catlow and Tim Wesson, or our apps, which demand the input of a whole host of people – illustrators, coders, sound engineers, script writers, and so on.
And one of Nosy Crow’s values has always been that we should earn our own seat at the creative table, as well – not just by printing the pages and getting books into shops, but by nurturing talent, providing support and offering input. Perhaps these are all different sorts of collaboration to the type The Simpsons skewers so well, but does it matter where a story comes from? What do you think?
I had a bit of a dust-up in Brazil with a well-known Argentinian writer, Alberto Manguel, who is the strongest possible advocate of print over digital reading.
My views have also been contrasted with those of Julia Donaldson, another strong defender of the primacy of print.
These are just two of many, many instances when I, or others of us at Nosy Crow, have defended digital, as opposed to print, reading for children.
So we were interested to see this article in the New York Times last weekend which suggests that adults who have discarded print in favour of their Kindles or Nooks still prefer traditional print books for their children.
We don’t see the choice between digital and print reading as an either/or scenario. Instead, we think that some reading experiences suit the page, while others are right for digital devices.
We aren’t very interested in creating digital reading experiences that are simply squashing an existing illustrated book onto a phone or a tablet.
Like some of the parents in the article, we agree that there is something special about paper – the touch and feel of it, the heft and three-dimensionality of it, and the size of the page – that means that reading a picture book, or a pop-up book, a lift-the-flap or a touch-and-feel book is a great experience. And there are many print picture books, pop-up books, lift-the-flap and touch-and-feel books in our existing and forthcoming book publishing plans
But we are also very aware that children spend increasing amounts of time using screens. We would like some of the time that they spend using those screens to be reading time. But that means, I think, that the reading experience we offer on screen needs to be as multimedia and interactive as the gaming experiences they will encounter in the same space.
What we want to avoid is creating disappointing screen-based reading experiences for children whose expectations of the interactivity of a screen-based device are formed very early, as the maker of this video showing a French baby who seems to think that a magazine is a broken iPad suggests. (The guy who posted the video was a Skype guest at Dust or Magic and he said that his child does not mistake children’s books for broken iPads.)
I take our responsibility as people with decades – in my case 25 years – of experience of telling stories on paper very seriously. I think that we should be bringing that experience – and adapting it and building on it too, of course, as we learn new skills and bring new skills, such as games devising and programming skills into publishing – to screen-based story-telling. If we don’t create really engaging reading experiences for children who will spend increasing amounts of their leisure time on screen, I think we are failing them.
And it’s that wish to create really engaging, multimedia, interactive iPad experiences that are also, crucially, reading experiences, that is behind apps such as The Three Little Pigs and Cinderella.
We’re thrilled to announce that our Cinderella app has won an award!
iLounge, the online magazine for mobile Apple devices, has declared Cinderella its iPad Kids App of the Year as part of its 2012 Buyers’ Guide, beating off stiff competition from runners-up including Dano Pirate HD from Bambino Avenue and ABC Food from Peapod Labs.
Jeremy Horwitz, iLounge’s Editor-in-Chief, said that, “Of all the kids’ applications we’ve tested over the past year for iPads, Nosy Crow’s Cinderella was most certainly the best. The story dates back centuries, but Nosy Crow’s version feels like something entirely new, bringing the classic characters to life inside funny, surprisingly interactive 3-D environments. The charming voice work alone is good enough to justify the purchase, and as you listen, you’ll discover a dozen little details that all work together to make Cinderella memorably excellent.”
You can download our press release here or view it here.
Since we released our first app, The Three Little Pigs, we’ve been hearing from educators that apps are playing a role in their teaching. Apps aren’t replacing existing teaching materials, but in some cases are complementing them. Nancy Barth, a former teacher and now a tutor in California, reviewed our Cinderella app and wrote about how she used it with her students. We were intrigued and contacted her to find out more. Here’s what she had to say.
1. What is your background and what work do you do now?
I started out teaching hearing impaired children in 1974. The visual appeal of apps would have been an asset for them. After that, I taught in a variety of general education and special education positions. I retired two years ago and started tutoring kids and adults with dyslexia, autism, and other learning/language disabilities.
2. When did you first start using apps with students and why?
I have four grown daughters and two grandsons, and I received an iPad1 from my daughters for Christmas. I immediately saw the potential uses to help me with my tutoring. I started looking for apps that would enhance the teaching of foundational reading skills, such as phonemic awareness, phonics and comprehension. Then I discovered the world of interactive books!
3. What impact have you seen from apps?
The learning opportunities for kids with autism and other learning disabilities are wide open with apps. They promote social interaction, language development, motor skills and more.
Kids are willing to work on all kinds of routine skills when they are embedded in apps. For example, apps like Wood Puzzle-Maze reinforce visual-figure ground, fine motor and motor-planning skills.
An app like Sound Literacy gives the teacher/tutor/parent great flexibility in working on phonemic awareness and phonics. I love having letter tiles that won’t fall off the table or get lost when the student is making words. It can also be projected on a screen to use with a whole class.
My nephew, who has autism, has wonderful story ideas, but putting pencil to paper is a huge struggle. I found an app called Sound Note, which allowed me to record his ideas while I typed along. When I couldn’t keep up, all I had to do was tap a word in the transcript, and everything he had said would play back. Then, My Writing Spot and Storyist helped me organize his work, and Book Creator made it possible to put his story into book form. After almost four months of talking and typing, his book is over 100 pages long!
4. What are some of the ways kids of different ages can benefit from reading book apps?
My grandson was 2½ when I got my iPad. He enjoyed reading stories with me, and then listening to them on his own. Now that he’s three, he likes recounting the stories and especially likes tapping on characters to hear the dialogue in apps like those from Nosy Crow.
Older kids benefit from book apps that highlight the words as the story is read to them. They are able to record themselves reading and this allows them to practice fluency in a non-threatening setting. Book apps like My Word Reader: Are Whales Smart, or What? highlight several of the more difficult vocabulary words. When the student taps on the word, a graphic depiction of it pops up.
While not strictly a book app, The Civil War Today takes learning American history to new heights by making primary source material available. There’s nothing like reading a diary entry or a letter in its original form. (And just in case that handwriting is a bit too spidery, it has text versions available, too).
5. You recently reviewed our new Cinderella app? How would you use this app as a teaching/learning tool with different aged children? What skills could the app help them develop?
I love Cinderella just as much as I love The Three Little Pigs. While I was writing my review, I happened to have the Common Core Standards (U.S.) out for a lesson I was planning. I decided to apply the standards at various grade levels to Cinderella. As I noted in my blog, Cinderella addresses standards for every grade K-5. I have no doubt that standards for middle and high school could be applied, too.
As you can see from the excerpt from my blog (above), using Cinderella as a teaching/learning tool helps younger children develop retelling skills, understanding of story components such as plot, setting, character, point of view, and determining a central message of a story. I especially liked how the app addresses the goal of having older children compare text and audio-visual presentations of a story.
6. What do you look for in an app?
I look for apps that are intuitive, multi-level, and enticing. I am a stickler for accuracy when it comes to the pronunciation of sounds, especially vowels, in phonics apps. I like apps that can be used in a variety of ways. For example, Milo’s Storybook was designed by a speech therapist. There is a record function to encourage the child to describe what is happening on the page. I’ve used it to pose questions for the child to think about before they go to the next page.
I look for apps such as Preposition Builder, when I want to work on specific language skills, because it keeps records by students and generates email reports. This is really helpful for keeping in touch with parents and showing growth.
7. What advice do you have for app developers?
If you’re going to make apps for children to use in school, take some time to review the educational standards of the country/countries you are focusing on. Better yet, observe at your neighborhood school and talk with teachers about what would enhance learning in the classroom.
While game-like apps are fun, apps that truly enhance and support the teaching-learning experience are more likely to be incorporated into classrooms.
I’m personally always on the lookout for an app that would allow me to record a student reading a short passage so I could analyze it for miscues. I would also like a built-in timer for checking fluency and something that would calculate words per minute and accuracy.
I would also like a book app for older kids that would allow kids to tap on an icon and see a question that relates to the content of the page, or that models making predictions of what’s to come. And of course, I would like a way for the child to record their answers!
8. Do you see any difference in the way parents vs. teachers can use book apps?
As a grandparent, I use book apps to let my grandson entertain himself while I’m working. I also read them with him, just as I would any book. As a tutor, I use book apps to specifically address the individual child’s needs, such as fluency or comprehension.
9. What advice do you have for teachers who might want to use apps in the classroom?
Make sure that students can benefit from using the apps independently. Get apps that address a specific need, such as phonics, or that are multi-functional, such as book apps. It’s better to have a few high quality apps than a multitude of so-so ones. Get apps that contribute to the learning experience.
Thank you Nancy!
This conversation sparked our interest in how teachers are using apps in the classroom. Are you an educator using apps? If so, we’d love to hear from you on Facebook or in the comment field below.
Today’s news about the growing popularity of video games for kids confirmed what we suspected has been happening.
The number of 2-17 year olds using video games has grown nearly 13% since 2009, according to “Kids and Gaming 2011”, the latest report from leading market research company, The NPD Group.
“Today, 91 percent of kids (approximately 64 million) ages 2-17 are gaming in the U.S., an increase of 9 points when compared to 2009. While the percentage of kids gaming has grown significantly across all age groups, the fastest growth has been among kids ages 2-5, with an increase of 17 points in gaming incidence when compared to 2009.”
Indeed, it’s clear that smartphones and tablets are competing with books for children’s attention. So as children spend more time in front of screens, we want them to find great stories there too. At Nosy Crow, we are using technology as a tool to engage children with reading and to spark their imagination. As children’s publishers, we have to take this opportunity; otherwise others will fill the gap with either inferior book apps or simply with games.
In the past nine months we have published two storybook apps for the iPad and iPhone, The Three Little Pigs and Cinderella. These apps are carefully thought-through stories. But they are neither e-books nor games. Instead, they use the features of the device – the touchscreen, the microphone, the accelerometer, and the camera – to give children an active role in advancing the story.
Readers’ responses to our apps have been enthusiastic. We know from blogs, emails and customer reviews that parents and teachers are excited about what we’re creating and see our apps as positive screen experiences. Primary school teachers say they use our apps to support reading comprehension, and to teach sequencing events in a story and parts of speech. Teachers of children with special needs tell us of new possibilities for learning and communication through our apps.
When children respond to a storybook app in these creative ways, we sense we’re doing something right. Children are not using these apps to tune out and turn off as they might with a repetitive game. Rather, apps can help them to switch on to the imaginative possibilities of timeless stories.
So should we be worried about kids and gaming? We don’t think so. Games are here to stay. But it’s up to those of us who are devoted to education and reading, to take what is so engaging about games and integrate it into digital storytelling and educational activities.
We’re happy to have Cinderella included in this apps round-up of “Visually stunning kids’ apps for iPad” on GADGETBOX on MSNBC.com. Click below to play the video.
And we appreciate the reviewer’s attempt at a “merry ol’ English” accent (watch until the end).
What a great surprise as we leave for a week at the Frankfurt Book Fair! The Gadgetwise Blog in today’s New York Times included Nosy Crow’s Cinderella app as one of Eight Noteworthy Apps for Children.
We are proud see Cinderella listed along with the classic “Harold and the Purple Crayon”, Peapod Labs’ “ABC Food” and Toca Boca’s “Toca Robot Lab” – a few of our favourites!
Here’s a quote from the story:
“If you coexist with children and iPads, you’ve undoubtedly discovered they have an insatiable “app”-itite (sorry, couldn’t resist). Here are eight recent noteworthy selections for younger users…
Cinderella – Nosy Crow Animated Picture Book ($6) raises the bar in children’s ebooks with such touches as an orchestrated sound track and a magic mirror that puts your child’s face into the story, by way of the front-facing camera. For ages 3-up.”
While we can’t give away all of our secrets, we thought it might be fun to share a “behind the scenes” look at how part of our Cinderella app came to life. In this video, Ed Bryan, Head of Apps-Creative and the illustrator and animator of Cinderella, explains how he created Cinderella’s moonlit garden.
So the fantastic news is that our Cinderella app was listed as one of the top 50 best ipad apps in The Observer yesterday. We’re absolutely delighted to be included in the same listing as, for example, BBC iPlayer, ebay and the award-winning Solar System for iPad apps!
Sadly, if you bought the print version of the paper, they used the icon for another version of Cinderella. But we know that is our version of Cinderella that they wanted to recommend, and they corrected the online version of the paper.
It’s been very exciting here at Nosy Crow. Last week we launched our second app, Cinderella, and we’ve been thrilled with the overwhelmingly positive response. We have received great feedback from parents, teachers, bloggers and app review sites.
And now, best of all, Cinderella has been recognised in the App Store. Yesterday Cinderella appeared in the list of Staff Favourites on the homepage of the App Store in the UK and Ireland. We took a screen shot because we just couldn’t believe our eyes!
Thank you for all of your support and your thoughtful emails and posts about Nosy Crow apps. Please spread the word, and keep the comments, fan photos, videos and feedback coming our way. We love to hear what you think of Cinderella and her adventures with her fairy godmother, her mean stepsisters and her shy, table-tennis-loving Prince.
In the past, we’ve written here about some of the best books for boys and girls, and have received lots of comments about what makes a great book for a boy or girl and suggestions of titles to add to each list.
And given the wide gulf between these lists, it’s always gratifying to see a book or app enjoying real crossover appeal, and even more so when it’s particularly unexpected. We’re very proud of our Cinderella storybook app, but equally, we are under no illusions – Cinderella is clearly skewed towards girls (though evidently that was not always the case).
And yet, rather pleasingly, this doesn’t seem to have discouraged male readers. Boys who would, in usual circumstances, most likely have no interest in a fairytale like Cinderella, have taken to it with gusto. In the photo below, you can see that Thomas, aged 6, has proudly helped the King stack up over 100 invitations to the ball:
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised that the app has proven to be such a hit with both sexes – it boasts great music and amazing artwork (which girls certainly don’t have a monopoly on liking), is highly interactive, and you can make the stuffy old stepmother do somersaults – a prospect that evidently holds universal appeal.
So if there are any male fans of Cinderella in your family, please – let us know! And – boys or girls – we’d love to know which parts of our Cinderella app are among your favourites.
It’s been a day since the launch of our second app, Cinderella, and already we’ve been blown away by the response – not just by bloggers and the press, but by everyone who has bought the app, and the parents and grandparents who’ve got in touch on our Facebook and Twitter pages to tell us what they’ve made of it.
We were particularly pleased by this great profile of Nosy Crow in the Guardian, as well as the coverage of Cinderella on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6Music show (though I fear I may have hurt Kate’s feelings by tweeting that our workplace had become “exponentially cooler” by virtue of having been mentioned by Laverne. Sorry, Kate.) On the 6Music blog, Stuart Dredge describes Cinderella as an app that “blends animation, interactivity and plenty of humour into something that’s genuinely beautiful”. Elsewhere, Digital Storytime have written that “Like their previous app, Nosy Crow has not forgotten a single detail in this delightful title … My child has been completely enthralled with this book from the moment I downloaded it.” On the US site iLounge, Jeremy Horowitz writes that “Three Little Pigs was great; Cinderella is even better”. You can read more of the reviews for Cinderella here.
It’s also been fascinating to track, on platforms like Twitter, the word-of-mouth buzz and instant responses to Cinderella in real time – evidently some fans were up at the crack of dawn to buy the app on iTunes!
Thanks to this amazing cumulative response, Cinderella is now the number one-selling book app for iPad in the UK and number seven in the US, which we’re simply overwhelmed by.
So a heartfelt thanks to those who’ve shown such enthusiasm for Cinderella already – we hope you continue to enjoy it!
You can buy Cinderella for iPad here.
And for iPhone and iPod touch here.
You are hereby cordially invited to the Nosy Crow Cinderella Ball!
That’s right, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. Today, our Cinderella app for iPad and Cinderella app for iPhone is live in iTunes! So put on your dancing shoes and join the fun.
Cinderella has everything so many of you loved about the Three Little Pigs app. A traditional story plus cool interactive elements. You can help Cinderella clean up the kitchen. Gather items the fairy godmother will turn into the magic horse-drawn carriage. Change the color of Cinderella’s dress. And even pick the music for the Prince and Cinderella’s dance. Classical, disco or Bollywood style? It’s up all to you.
And there’s a special surprise for those of you who have an iDevice with a front-facing camera, like the Pad2, iPhone4 or the fourth generation iPod touch. The camera will capture an image of your face and insert it right onto the screen of the story. You’ll actually appear right there inside the “magic mirrors” in Cinderella’s house, next to her and her stepsisters.
So what else can we say? We hope you love Cinderella, and we’d love to hear your feedback. Leave a comment below, or on Twitter @nosycrowapps, or on our Facebook page. Better yet… leave a review on iTunes and help our version of Cinderella rise magically to the top of the app charts!!
That’s right, Cinderella, our next 3-D fairytale app for iPad and iPhone will be available starting September 13! Needless to say, we’re very excited.
It’s taken a bit longer than anticipated, but I assure you, it’s well worth the wait. We’ve built upon the functionality in our Three Little Pigs app to make Cinderella a truly magical experience.
Cinderella combines Ed Bryan’s beautiful illustrations and animation with open-ended activities that actively engage children in the storytelling. As the story unfolds, readers can gather items for Cinderella’s fairy godmother to transform into the coach and horses, select the dance music at the ball, and help everyone try on the glass slipper. They can even choose the style and colour of Cinderella’s gown!
And those using an iPad2 or iPhone4 can see themselves in the fairytale.
We saw The Three Little Pigs app entertain and delight young readers. Parents sent us videos of their children reading along and talking about the story. Cinderella takes this engagement to a whole new level. As you can see in the video trailer, reading Cinderella has inspired some children to dance!
Who knew that a picture book app could get children to dance?! Well, we didn’t. But that was just one of the wonderful surprises at the shoot for our Cinderella app video trailer.
Cinderella is the second app in our series of 3D Fairy Tales, and we’re just a month away from its release. So while brothers Ed and Will Bryan are putting the finishing touches on the animations and coding, it was time to make our video.
All along, we’ve felt that our Cinderella app is enchanting and magical. And dare we say, it may even be a step up from our Three Little Pigs app! Ed’s illustrations are beautiful, the characters’ comments are insightful and funny, and we’ve incorporated new interactive features that truly involve children in the story. Kids can drag things across the kitchen to help Cinderella clean-up; they can catch mice in the garden for the Fairy Godmother to transform into the carriage’s coachman and horses; and they can even change the colour of Cinderella’s dress.
But we hadn’t expected the reaction we got from these girls – the second Cinderella and the Prince hit the dance floor at the ball, THEY were dancing too!
And we always thought reading was more of a sedentary activity…
Stay tuned for more news about the final weeks leading up to the launch of our Cinderella app.
What goes into developing a great children’s storybook app? A life-long fascination with computers and gaming technology, that’s what! Recently I talked to Will Bryan (photo of his studio above) about his experience developing The Three Little Pigs. Will’s background is in video games and before joining Nosy Crow as Head of Apps Development – Engineering, he spent 13 years working for Nintendo and Microsoft on titles such as Banjo-Tooie and Viva Piñata.
What was your first computer?
I grew up around computers and the first one I remember having was the Sinclair ZX81. It was customised with a proper push-button keyboard rather than the membrane one they came with. We soon moved on to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Atari ST and beyond. About five years ago I went onto the Internet and tracked down some of these old machines.
What kind of work have you done in the past?
I’ve built websites, developed several video games, and for the last couple of years I’ve been looking into original ideas for Xbox 360 Kinect by day and original ideas for iPhone by night, which is how I came to be at Nosy Crow.
Why have you gone from games to making apps?
Game development has become a bit of a monster. It’s no longer possible for an individual on a game team to have a nice little idea, build it, polish it and have everybody smiling about it on the same day. App development scales all that back. Individuals can have an idea for an app and ship it within a month if they want. Nosy Crow has eleven employees and not all of them are involved in the app side of the business. Those of us that are can sit around a small table and just get on with it. Ideas shared, suggestions thrown about, decisions made.
How do you and your brother Ed (Nosy Crow’s Head of Apps Development – Creative) work together to create an app?
Like a well oiled machine – if only that were true! We’ve been working together for more than 25 years, so we are starting to get the hang of it. My work usually consists of finding how we take an idea and make it a reality. Ed’s much better at honing the fit and finish of an idea once it’s working. He provided a lot of feedback on The Three Little Pigs app features, like flicking the characters. We end up exchanging emails with made up words in them: “Are they flicky enough yet?” “Is the pingyness too much?” If this goes on too long we end up looking at things together and demonstrating issues.
How do you work with illustrators?
It’s a very collaborative process. Since this is a new format, there’s a lot of learning for everyone involved. I’ve found that the quicker we prototype a scene or a character that we can look at and play with, the better. In The Three Little Pigs, we took the original 2d illustrations and arranged them in a 3d model, a bit like a puppet theatre. Each illustration had a place on the stage and we could look around the stage to reveal different things. The accelerometer on the iPad and iPhone allowed us to show how a 2d illustration could be made into so much more.
On the Animal SnApp series we’re working closely with Nikalas and Tim on how to animate their artwork for the app. Their illustration style is very different to that of The Three Little Pigs. As part of our discussions, Nikalas and Tim created a brief video clip to demonstrate how the animation should work. On my side, I expect we’ll produce a bunch of very small prototypes for this project as we work out the best way to proceed.
What was the best part of making The Three Little Pigs?
I always like the last few weeks or months of a project the best. You reach a point where you are on the home straight, the product is mostly complete and you’re busy polishing everything to make it the best it can be. Working with Robin on the music was great. He was keen to make some of the music interactive, which you can hear working in Scene 3 where the pigs first leave home: each pig has his or her own instrument that fades into the music when tapped. It’s detail like this that makes me very proud of The Three Little Pigs.
What was the biggest challenge?
There’s always a worry about whether it’ll all come together on time. The Three Little Pigs is my first iPad/iPhone/iPod touch app and although it’s “just software” I don’t have another engineer sitting across the office from me to talk through problems. Fortunately, over the years I’ve become quite good at figuring things out for both myself and others. Many problems have been solved away from the computer and at the most unexpected moments.
You must see lots of apps. Can you tell us about your favourite ones?
It’s funny, every few weeks we gather together at the Crow’s Nest to discuss projects and the table fills up with iPads, iPhones and iPod touches. I can always tell which devices are mine as I seem to have far fewer apps installed than anyone else. I’ve got a little puzzle game on my iPhone called Glow Puzzle that I continue to enjoy. I like it because I can take as long as I like to study the puzzle before making a move. I’m still waiting for the original Lemmings games to appear on the App Store. I’d be first in line to download them!
What advice would you give to children interested in making their own apps, or computer games?
I recommend looking at other people’s apps or games and begin to question how they work. What happens when you press a button or tap a character? What does a character do if you don’t do anything? If you start to break apps down, they’re often a lot less complicated than they first appear. Software developers are very good at using tricks to make things look cleverer than they really are. Plenty of smoke and mirrors!
What are you working on now?
Our next app is another 3D fairy tale: Cinderella. I’ll be building upon the code I created for The Three Little Pigs but there will also be several new features and some very cool interactive surprises. With the iPad2, I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do to make our storybook apps even more exciting for children.
This is big bananas for us, and we have been working flat-out to get ready for it.
It is one of two weeks in the year – the other is the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, but Bologna’s the big one – when we meet the non-UK publishers we’ll do business with for the rest of the year. At Bologna, we have just 30 minutes (20 if they have to queue for the loo before the appointment) to impress a foreign publisher with our books. The aim of the game is to sell, or at least interest them in buying, the right to publish our books in translation.
For the last few months, Anne-Marie’s been putting together the schedule of selling appointments for me and for Adrian. We have appointments every half-hour from 9.00am to 5.30pm without breaks for three-and-a-half days.
For the last month, since the launch of The Three Little Pigs app, Ed and Will have been working with Deb on our next app in the 3D Fairy Tale series, Cinderella.
For the last month, too, Imogen’s been collecting together final print and freight prices for books of many different sizes and kinds – board books and pop-up books and picture books, and working out how much we have to sell them for in order to stay in business. This is a hard task: we always want our books to be the best they can be – to have the heaviest paper, the most spectacular pop-ups the most unusual touch-and-feels – and it’s tough to compromise!
For the past few weeks we’ve been receiving artwork from illustrators. Some of it arrived in time for us to proof it, but most of it, because we are still new and building our list and publishing sooner after artwork delivery than is ideal, did not, so we’ve had to make dummies using photocopies of the art stuck into blank books. This is an unbelievably time-consuming, tricky, painstaking and monotonous task, and Steph and Nia, in addition to doing lots of last-minute designing, have been working on this tirelessly with Camilla. Nia finished the very last one at 10.30pm yesterday evening.
And for the past few weeks we’ve also been pulling together words and pictures to add to the books section of our website to announce some of the books we’ll be taking to Bologna, including The Grunts, the acquisition of which we announced to a great response on Wednesday.
For the past day or so, we’ve had a steady stream of meetings with people who are in the UK before they go to the book fair – our Japanese agent, Noriko Hasagawa, for example – who I mentioned in a recent post – and Liz Bray from our Australian distributors, Allen and Unwin. They have gamely picked their way through the chaos of the office, and brushed scraps of paper and fur-fabric (for touch-and-feel books) from chairs before sitting down at a table that is slightly sticky with glue.
For the past day or so, too, I have finally been getting down to working on the slides for the first Tools of Change Conference to happen in Bologna, at which I am – eek! – the first keynote speaker on Sunday.
And yesterday, as if we didn’t have enough to do, we bought (or at least confirmed the deals on) three picture book texts, illustrations for two picture books and a debut novel.
