In 1997, the Nokia 6110 phone offered the first mobile app (of a game called Snake). In 2007, the app market took off in earnest after the introduction of the iPhone and even more so when iPads came into the marketplace in 2011. By 2015, when our research team first wrote a series of guiding principles for developing truly “educational apps,” the market was already flooded with more than 80,000 so-called educational apps; the vast majority of these apps had no research behind their design or implementation that was linked to the science of how children learn. They were designed for platforms for adult use, not educational opportunities for children. Even now, designers use the term “educational” quite freely for products that many scientists think have only passing connection to anything educational.
In our article, we suggested four principles for creating a good educational app. The principles were drawn from consensus on the science of how children learn. We wrote that:
Learning should be active, not passive, and that children learn best in environments that are “minds-on.” This means that a simple swipe did not count as an “active” move in an educational setting. The app should be engaging rather than distracting and only include bells and whistles that are integrated into the narrative of the game, lesson, or storyline. Many of the apps on the market interrupted the storyline with a chance to probe children’s vocabulary (e.x., “What else is red or starts with a B?”) And/or include persuasive ads that pop up to distract children to buy a different app. The app should tap into something meaningful for the child. There should be some point of connection that will allow children to relate the content of the app to what they know, rather than to start in a foreign space. Finally, the app should encourage social interaction inside or outside the app space, not just playing solo.
In 2018, the list of principles was expanded to include that learning should be iterative, such that an app would encourage children to achieve a learning goal through a number of different pathways or allow for a similar but slightly different experience on each encounter. Lastly, the experience should also be joyful, as children learn better when motivated through joy. Together, the principles of active, engaged, meaningful, socially interactive, iterative, and joyful coalesce in what we called “playful learning,” an umbrella term based in science that broadly incorporates how children learn through both free play and guided play.
However, the key to making these apps truly educational requires one additional step. Learning occurs best when the playful activity has a well-articulated learning goal, be it in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), literacy, or “learning to learn” skills like memory, attention, and flexible thinking.
By 2021, A team led by Marisa Meyer and Jenny reviewed the top downloaded educational apps from places like Google Play and Apple to see if the principles outlined above were becoming more prevalent in current educational apps available for children. Sadly, they were not. Of the highest downloaded paid apps for young children, 50 percent scored in the low-quality range, with only seven apps earning a score that put them in the highest quality category. Free apps scored even worse.
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