Week 3

I found the readings for this week really interesting. I felt that the rubric for measuring an app presented in the Hirsch-Patek et al. paper was particularly interesting.
I thought that the pillars of science of learning and the way they could translate to apps were particularly interesting and helped provide some insight into how to go about app development.
Also, while I did like the attempt to quantify and visually portray something like app effectiveness, I thought that it was slightly limiting and that something like ‘engagement’ is highly subjective.
Additionally it is evident that some apps are fun and educative whereas some are only fun. I feel that a more interesting question to tackle is how to design fun and educative apps that are more appealing than only fun apps. This problem is evidenced by the fact that Toca Boca Hair Salon is a far far far more popular app than Alien Assignment (which has only around 100,000 downloads).
The E-Reading paper was fascinating too. I found the portion that mentioned that E-reading can be used to encourage reading amongst reluctant readers to be really insightful.
Two questions that I have are how something as abstract as engagement can be measured and how do we account for variations amongst different children.