Photo from the University of Michigan Health Lab.

“When creating content, be empathetic above all else. Try to live the lives of your audience." – Rand Fishkin

To paraphrase UX strategist Tanya Junell, designing a good children’s app is more than just dumbing down adult concepts – it's about evaluating the user experience of playful, interactive learning experiences with children.

For this blog post, I'm going to focus on the difference between younger children (ages 5 through 8) and older children (ages 9 through 12). So often, product designers, developers, and UX strategists group them together, which leads to less effective products.

While children under the age of 13 may share similar social, economic, and demographic experiences (like growing up under the same federal policies and laws), they don't all operate on the same developmental level, emotionally, morally, or physically. Thus, app developers may consider creating pathways for alternate app experiences based on the age of the user.

Here are some key take-aways:

1. Younger children often experience difficulties and frustration during registration processes of apps/websites, because they don't appreciate and realize their importance. (Sometimes, children will quit using an app because of log-in issues.)

2. Younger children have more brain plasticity – that's what makes them so lively! They may more quickly learn how to use and adapt to new technologies, and so the on-boarding process could go faster, in addition to containing more complicated material. Younger children can also more quickly learn new languages, new instruments, new sports, and almost everything more quickly than adults; the possibilities for knowledge acquisition through educational apps are endless.

3. Older children are more likely to get into trouble on apps. This should be self-explanatory for any parent.

4. When not distracted by advertisements or social media sites, children of all ages will use apps to learn. Children often experience all-consuming interests in certain subjects, like dinosaurs or birds, and will use apps, websites, and similar outlets to discover and explore their passions. (Remember when you were a kid and spent hours and hours reading about something you found neat, like butterflies or trees? Technologies can empower children to fully investigate a subject, and so they're not limited to the books they find in libraries, television programs at home, or what their parents know.)

5. Surprising fact! Because the brains of children have more neuroplasticity, they are actually able to recover from screen exposure more quickly than adults. This is promising for the potential to shape and optimize the digital environment, specifically to allow the human brain to more fully absorb knowledge (Mednick and Ehrman 2002).

Image from iTunes.

“We are raised in a culture that values expertise over exploration.” ~ Nina Wise

Which apps best help children learn to read? Which are good for problem-solving skills? And which ones just waste time?

When I was little, I remember spending hours and hours playing Humongous Entertainment games, like Spy Fox and Pajama Sam. They were quite enjoyable, but what did I learn? These were a series of point-and-click adventure games, where children would progress through a story by solving simple puzzles; while fun, the educational content was low.

With all of the games, iPhone applications, virtual worlds, and digital toys available, it's hard for parents to know which make the best educational tools for their children. Though I'll make recommendations throughout this post, with thousands of digital products available on our vast global market, it's more important to know what to look out for, instead of which ones rank the highest now.

1. In the same vein, digital products should teach children how to think, not what to think. In our increasingly automated world, the ability to quickly learn new skills is critical. In addition, the wicked problems future generations will face – global climate change, mass poverty, food shortages, explosive population growth, healthcare systems unable to support increased lifespans, to name a few – necessitate original and inventive solutions.

We should teach children design thinking skills.

As a quick refresher, design thinking is a process for creative problem-solving. When children gain confidence in their creative abilities, amazing things happen. For example, through experimenting with new ways of doing things and contemplating new answers to problems, children develop social-emotional skills that they can use when interacting with others.

Look for applications like Wizard School, which pairs open-ended tools creativity tools with highly engaging content. Avoid games like Tetris and Farmville, where successful outcomes rely on rote learning and memorization. (Those games can improve focus, but I think they create unhealthy neural pathways in children.)

2. Because children have higher levels of neuroplasticity than adults, and thus can absorb new information more quickly, the games they play with should adapt to their knowledge levels. In addition, children are equipped to learn languages faster because the prefrontal cortex of their brains, where working memory is stored, is less developed than in adults.

Duolingo (one of my favorite learning apps) is a great app for children, as it gives continually evolving instruction in 85 different languages. Not only can children learn at their own pace, the app adjusts its difficulty level to the ability of the user. Avoid educational products like Motion Math Zoom, which don't evolve with the learner.

3. Because of this development of the prefrontal cortex, adults experience functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that limits a person to see an object exactly as it is. Adults will look at a cardboard box exactly as it is, while children will look at it as a time-traveling machine, a performing stage, a spaceship...

The best digital products allow children to create and explore new worlds. One of my favorite apps, Fuzzy Numbers, lets children wander through a fairy-tale realm while practicing foundational early math skills. For older students, educational tools like Engaging Congress and 3rd World Farmer (outdated name, great game) encourage the investigation of complicated challenges.

If the above feels overwhelming, these two questions should help guide your assessment of educational products:

Does the app keep your child's developing brain hooked with rewards like silly sound effects and force specific paths and outcomes? Or does it put the child in the driver's seat, allowing them to learn and explore at their own pace?

(There seem to be only two categories: digital candy and learning experiences like Metaverse.)

Image from Adobe stock footage.

"Design can solve society’s biggest problems… if we cultivate a love of learning through the design process." – David Sherwin, Director of User Experience at lynda.com

According to Vygotsky, a foundational child psychologist, learning happens through social interaction with others and the environment. If left to discover things on their own, people won’t learn very much – for full cognitive development, they must interact with more experienced learners or materials.

So what implications does this have for digital learning? If we learn best from other people, do we need to see or talk to them in real life?

Here's what I've found.

1. Collaboration among students, specifically in regards to more experienced learners working with less experienced learners, is key for effective learning. It does not matter what medium this happens over. Lesser experienced learners could interact with Wikipedias, online tutorials, apps like DuoLingo, etc.

2. According to research studies, collaborative learning enhances engagement, cognition, and critical thinking. In digital environments when the students are responsible for one another's learning as well as their own, overall outcomes significantly improve.

3. Digital learning tools offer unique chances for children to achieve higher learning, because they can be exposed to more experienced or higher-achieving learners in all subjects. In the standard classroom, a child’s capacity to learn and grow is capped at the highest-achieving peer or teacher, who may not fully understand certain material. If online learning is designed well, children can effectively learn more advanced concepts in subjects like math and languages from their peers.

4. Collaborative wikis allow children to develop more collaborative writing skills at a higher developmental rate than previously thought possible, because of the vast opportunities to share and add information with more experienced learners.

5. Creators of digital learning models (often) do not create the natural social environments people need to fully learn. Speech is highly instrumental in our reasoning abilities and our ability to make sense of the world and our social environments. Digital learning has a lacuna of surrounding speech that we would ordinarily learn from our environment, like real-life conversations between classroom teachers and peers in the classroom, which may have negative consequences on our development. Creators should consider incorporating social tools, like voice-to-voice chat, in their digital frameworks.