Red Apple Reading: Educational Reading Web App for Children
Industry
Elearning
Location
USA
Partnership period
2013-2018
Team size
7
Project information
Overview
The Red Apple Reading is a popular American online educational platform for children. It helps children learn to read English in a gaming manner, making the process easy and fun! On the other hand, parents and educators have full control on children’s progress. The platform attracts around 50 thousand users a month, mostly from the United States and Canada.
Our Task
The whole idea was to enable the gamification of the educational process, specifically the lessons of English. The platform had to provide the following functionality for users:
Parents
- To control the educational process of their children
- To monitor child’s success and progress
Children
- To receive an education in the form of a game
- To develop and improve language skills while learning
Additionally, we were requested to improve the usability of the platform. Hence, we decided to move the admin panel to Zend and restructure it according to the client’s request.
Implementation
User Roles
The functionality implemented by CodeIT specialists varies for different user roles that are the following:
- Student. Completes tasks, reads, watches videos, and repeats after the audio. All that children do together with the main characters that each level has
- Parent. Through the personal dashboard, monitors the progress of the child, downloads free materials, controls the account
- Educators. Can purchase and manage packages for groups of children
- Schools and businesses. Organizations can become vendors between RedApple and parents
- Admin. Managers users and accounts, collects statistics, responds to user requests
All accounts come with access to the following:
- The dashboard to manage the account
- Lock/unlock lessons and set language settings
- Free “Members-only” apps
- Progress reports that can be automatically emailed or printed
- Downloadable workbooks, e-guides, flashcards, and more
Admin Dashboard
The above-mentioned Admin panel is the workplace for the admin users where they can:
- See the general statistics
- Manage users
- Pricing plans
- Email templates
- Web pages and their content
- Generate special products and redeemed keys
- Create promo codes
- Manage downloadable products
- See various reports
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Features implemented
The foremost user roles and the functionality they can access are as follows.
Parents
The 1st main user role is the parent. To create the account, the potential users need to register and choose the pricing plan.
The signed parents’ main window is the dashboard. It shows the user’s children and the progress they make. The account for the child is created by the parent only. Further, the parent monitors the child’s activity, what levels were played, what tasks, when, and what score the child received. The parent can lock/unlock lessons for the levels and set up language settings. Moreover, here, the user can manage account information, download free materials, and read/download the RedApple Magazine, which is published every 2 months.
Students
Children also have their own logins and passwords, which are created for them by their parents. The platform for children offers 3 levels: A, B, and C. Parents should show the children what level they should use depending on their age.
After that, the gaming learning begins. To provide the gamification, we used Cocos2d-x, which is an open-source engine under the MIT License, and it allows for compiling and running on multiple platforms with one code base.
Together with the client, we worked on the logic of the system, thought through all the moves and steps, created the mechanics of unit interactions, and implemented it using the mentioned-before game framework.
Educators
Educators are mostly teachers who want to use this platform in their lessons. They can purchase a package that is set for 10 kids by default, and adding more accounts for children comes with an additional price. The registration process is the same as for parents; there is an option of promo code discount.
Result
An e-learning platform with global reach and gamification
The application enables young learners to grasp new skills effectively thanks to the gamification of the learning process. The solution has a global reach and comprises dozens of thousands of active users.
Apart from the desktop version of the RedApple platform (that has separate websites in English, Spanish, and Mandarin), we have created iOS and Android apps that synchronize with the web version. Every user can create an account and buy subscriptions either via desktop or right from their mobile devices. Some of the iOS apps were converted to Android with the help of the Apportable SDK.
Services
- iOS Development
- Android Development
- Web Development
- UX/UI Design
- Business Analysis
- Quality Assurance
Team
- iOS developer
- Android developer
- Front-end developer
- Back-end developer
- Business analyst
- UX/UI designer
- QA specialist
Technology stack
- PHP
- Zend 2 Framework
- MySQL
- HTML5
- JS
- AJAX
- jQuery
- PayPal API
- Authorize.net API
- iOS SDK
- UIKit
- Android SDK
- Cocos2d-x
- Apportable SDK
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Web Development
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iOS Development
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Android Development
Release Android apps built for speed and full functionality.
Quality Assurance
Ensure a flawless UX with manual and automated app testing.