For my review and redesign I have chosen the application Toca Kitchen 2. This app has over 210,000 downloads only on the iStore and is aimed for children between 3-8 years-old. With an approximate rating of 4.3 stars, this app seems to be extremely enjoyable.

The usage of the app is simple: users select a character from a choice of three characters and proceed to make plates of food that the character can eat. The left side of the screen has shelves with food and the right shelves with cooking utensils such as frying pans, knives, boiling pots etc. Players can simply drag and drop the food/ cooking utensils to use them.

First, I am going to focus on the positives of the app. The first thing that I noticed and appreciated about this app was the gender, racial and cultural neutrality. The three characters offered by the app are quite cartoonish and don’t seem to come from any particular race and can be interpreted to belong to any race or none. (one of the characters is like a humanoid with teeth sticking out and ears sticking out from the top of his head.) Additionally, the app doesn’t use language but universal cues such as a character sighing, licking his/her lips, smiling etc. to convey messages. Also, the app doesn’t play to any gender norms and is gender neutral.

As far as the design and graphics are concerned, the app is beyond approach. The intuitive usage of the app is what possibly hooks young children and ensures that they pick up the game quickly. The app is manipulated completely by the users and the users are free to do whatever they want to. Hence, it is highly active. The bright, funny and colorful graphics then probably keep children engaged and attentive. The characters tend to have amusing responses to certain foods such as spitting out the food or sticking out their tongue and this, along with the complete freedom to do whatever they want, ensures that kids are engaged.

As far as the meaningful pillar is concerned, the app is effective to a certain extent. Children are using vegetables, fruits, meats (there is a vegetarian option for the game also!) to cook. They can hopefully draw connections between what they eat and what they are feeding the characters. This way they should be able to make meaningful connections. However, other than this usage of everyday food, the app offers no additional route for meaning making.

On the social interaction pillar the app falls short. While it is possible for many kids to be playing and looking at the same screen, the app offers no additional facilities for it. The game is possible only in single player mode and has no reason for interactivity.

So while the app rates well on active and engaging pillars, fairly decently on the meaningful pillar, it rates low on the interactivity pillar.

As far as the learning goals are concerned, there don’t seem to be any. One of the major selling strategies of the application is that it is essentially not a game but a ‘digital toy’. This means that the app allows the kids to freely play with it however they want to with no strategy, covert learning goals or way to win the game. There are no tangible rewards such as points. This approach while interesting, limits the teaching opportunities the app has.

With just a few minor tweaks, this app can potentially be useful for teaching kids about nutrition. The revisions that I am going to suggest will hopefully increase the learning goals of the app while staying somewhat true to its ethos of being a ‘toy’. The revisions lie mainly in four factors-

1)Asking the users for their age and activities they enjoy doing

2) The characters making requests for food.

3) Adding a happiness and health meter. The happiness meter should fluctuate depending on how well the children adhere to character request and the health meter according to the nutrition in the food.

4) One pop-up question about the consequences of the meal the character ate.

First, the app can ask the children for their age and some activities that they enjoy doing (Eg. playing football, dancing, singing) . It should choose its ‘teaching level’ according to the age of the child and store the activities that they are doing. (The purpose for this is simply meaning making so that the child can relate this to their own lives and this feature can be removed)

The characters can make requests for the kinds of meals they want (Eg. I want to eat a vegetable, fruit and some meat so that I am fit while INSERT ACTIVITY  today, OR I want to be unhealthy today. Give me chocolate, bread and fried vegetables!  For older kids- ‘I want a meal rich in proteins, vitamin A and carbohydrates’, ‘I want to grow tall. Feed me food that will help me?’ , ‘Give me a balanced meal today!’) The kids should then try and make those meals. Depending on how well they adhere to the task the happiness meter of the character should fluctuate.

Once the character has been fed, depending on the meal, the character can respond. If the meal is high on the happiness meter characters can lick their lips and smile. Otherwise if the meal is low on the happiness meter, the character can stick out their tongue and show dissatisfaction as they do now. There can then be a pop up menu with all the food options asking children what they think the character would prefer to eat depending on the request. If the child picks the wrong items, the app should show the children an example of a meal that matches the request. (Although this would be a good opportunity to make the child seek an adult, I feel that will limit the app in other ways.)

For older kids, there can be another message after that depending on the food the character ate. (Eg. meal high on chocolate- ‘I was having fun while INSERT ACTIVITY but then my tooth began aching! What do you think I ate that lead to this?’)

This way, simply by allowing the characters to make requests, adding the questions and tweaking the feedback system, the app can potentially teach children about nutrition.

The Peg + Cat app brings to bear the impact potential of parasocial factors in promoting user engagement and advancing learning outcomes. I was drawn to the Peg + Cat app after having seen one of the episodes with my nieces; I felt a sense of familiarity with the characters due to that previous interaction (Hirsh, 2015). This familiarity was similar to the feeling my peers and I experienced in class when reading with the Buzz Lightyear e-book; because we recognized the characters and their stories, we perceived ourselves to have a deeper interaction with them even if they could not respond to us (Hirsh, 2015, p. 19). I was interested in what the Peg + Cat characters had to say to me through the app because I felt I was building off of a previous interaction. I developed an affinity for Peg and her posse, so when Peg asked me to help her count all of her friends to make sure no one was left behind, I truly was interested in helping. In this way, I experienced firsthand the engagement benefits of parasocial relationships, which I can only imagine to be amplified for users between the ages of three and six. My engagement was further exacerbated through the singing and cheering of the characters. These acts became extrinsic motivators for me to continue to play the game, perform well, and remain on task (Hirsh, 2015). Due to all of these factors, I would expect the Peg + Cat app to do an effective job of teaching kids counting skills (Hirsh, 2015; Richert et. al, 2011, p. 89). Ultimately, the Peg + Cat app’s use of parasocial relationships to engage young learners provides an effective means of working toward the learning outcome of learning to count.

Despite the advantages of utilizing parasocial factors to advance learning, the Peg + Cat app does not use its interactive potential to the best effect. The “Giant Hide and Seek” game, in particular, sheds light on the limitations of the app via its poor visual design. The game involves hiding some of the characters in inanimate objects to prevent them from being found by the adults, thereby teaching users to match characters to open slots. In the screen capture of the game below, you can see how users are expected to drag each of the five characters one by one into the available slots in a frame or a bowl. Particularly among users closer to three years old that are just beginning to grasp the symbolic representation of objects on the screen, the mere outline of a frame and a bowl may not translate to the actual objects those shapes are intended to represent (Richert et. al, 2011). A more effective design might use images of the actual objects with a more creative interface that portrays what would happen in real life. Specifically, users would see an actual bowl and drag characters into the bowl rather than placing the characters on top of its outline. In this way, the learner would find meaning in the game that goes beyond the confines of the app (Hirsh, 2015). Implementing these minor though significant design improvements has the potential to augment the learning experience for users, especially those on the older side of the age range for whom this game might prove too easy to be engaging.

Overall, the Peg + Cat app is a worthwhile tool for teaching some of the basics of counting and math. While it takes advantage of parasocial factors to draw users, it could take advantage of simple improvements to escalate learning outcomes for users.

References

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Zosh, J.M, Golinkoff, R.M., Gray, J.H., Robb, M.B., & Kaufman, J. (2015). Putting Education in “Educational” Apps: Lessons From the Science of Learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16, 3-34.

Richert, R.A., Robb, M.B., & Smith, E.I. (2011). Media as social partners: The social nature of young children’s learning from screen media. Child Development, 82-95.