The App looks like it will be user friendly and very appealing to children and their parents—helping to introduce them to basic concepts of evolution and environment. How did you go about testing the concepts and the development of the app? Did you target any particular ages or groups? What challenges did you encounter in the process? Where are you in the research process—do you have data on how this is being received; what the participants are learning, etc.? Simplifying complex science concepts is extremely important and it will be good to know how this tool contributes to that goal. I would also be interested in knowing how you plan to market the App. Looking forward to learning more about your good work!

I am wondering if we can break this discussion open a bit to talk about the larger context of learning life sciences through apps to begin with. Do we know anything about how young learners learners tend to interact with apps? Are there criteria that differentiate “interactive” from “non-interactive” viewing experiences? Is learning different when there is a narrative storyline vs. when it more gamelike? What is the difference between inquiry based apps and apps that are built around discovery learning (puzzle solving) ? Do we even have indicators to reliably differentiate these different genres? Are there some apps that really compel the learner to take what they are learning back out into the world off-screen? Does that matter? Or not?

Wonderful narrated multimedia presentations! Is it possible to learn more about the interactivity in this or any other books you have developed? For example, do you present students with questions and answer choices about the presentation, followed by feedback on their choices?

Hi everyone, thanks for your comments and questions. It certainly does seem like Apps remain a compelling frontier for reaching young people with STEM content, with endless possibilities. When we set out to build this App a few years ago there was not much (any?) synthetic material out there as far as best practices in this regard. Our goal was to raise awareness of basic evolutionary principles among young children (pre-elementary to early elementary) who would be experiencing the app along with their parents or guardians in a ‘story time’ setting. We wanted to meet young people “where they are” – which now days is interacting with high quality media on tablets and smartphones. So far we’ve had almost 30,000 downloads of the app but we could definitely do a better job disseminating it – budget constraints limited what we could do in this regard but I’m hoping to find some good suggestions/ideas about App dissemination here in these discussion forums! Anyone had any successful experiences disseminating STEM apps that they could share? However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised with the engagement we’ve seen given the dissemination constraints. Perhaps that means there is an audience hungry for this kind of media content? Barring budget constraints it would have also been very valuable to include methods for tracking demographic metrics and other feedback from our users – we would highly recommend doing this to others if their resources allow. Otherwise it is hard to know where the App goes once it is “in the wild”.

This is a fun narrative. One question I have is, does it make sense to teach about evolution when kids have little experience with variation in nature, and don’t necessarily understand some pre-suppositions (e.g. that offspring tend to be similar to their parents, though not always…)? And theres’s a lot of natural history that may confuse the story — e.g. some organisms solve the “visibility against the background” problem by changing colors in context. Etc. etc.
So I wonder if the apps might be used to aim at some other foundational ideas, which could then prepare the way for the idea of evolution at a later age?

Will the project be doing any research that can tease out what concepts participants are learning; what notions or ideas “stick” with them; or what foundational ideas emerge as they work through the App? It would also be useful to find out if misconceptions emerge and the strength of those misconceptions. That might help guide a next step in App design and testing.

Great video and it makes the app look engaging. Are there additional activities in addition to tapping to hear the narration? How are you going about distribution? We’re looking at developing an interactive comic book for middle school and are looking at options developing it in ebook or ibook instead of an app. What was your criteria for choosing the app route?