The Red Apple Reading is a popular American online educational platform for children of ages 3-10. It helps children learn to read English in a gaming manner, making the process easy and fun! From other side, 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.
The whole idea is the gamification of the educational process, specifically the lessons of English. The platform had to provide the following functionality for users:
Plus it was important to improve the usability of the platform so we decided to move the admin panel to Zend and restructure it according to the client’s request. Responsible for the admin panel is Admin user, who has all the rights and controls the whole functionality of the platform.
Later it was decided to add several more roles – Educators, Schools & Businesses. These users can claim specific packages to use them further for the educational purposes in educational establishments to work with groups of kids at the same time.
The 1st main user role is Parent. To create the account the potential users needs to register and choose the pricing plan.
Signed Parents’ main window is dashboard. It shows user’s children and the progress they make. The account for the child is created by the parent only. Further the Parent monitors child’s activity, what level were played, what tasks, when and what score did the child receive. The Parent can lock/unlock lessons for the levels and setup language settings. Moreover here the user can manage account information, download free materials and read/download the RedApple Magazine that is published every 2 months.
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 the Cocos2d-x which is an open source engine under MIT License, and it allows for compiling and running on multiple platform 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 units interactions and implemented it using the mentioned-before game framework.
Educators are mostly teachers who want to use this platform at the lessons. They can purchase a package that is set for 10 kids by default and adding more accounts for children comes with additional price. The registration process is the same as for parents, there is an option of promo code discount.
Apart from the desktop version of the RedApple platform (that has separate websites in English, Spanish and Mandarin and all have their own admin panels ) we have created iOS and Android apps that synchronize with the web version. Every user can create an account and buy subscription either via desktop or right from their mobile devices. Some of the iOS apps were converted to Android with the help of Apportable SDK.
The project keeps developing to bring more to its users and our team is happy to preserve the partnership with our clients. We keep creating new features and functionalities for this project and implement new ideas together. In 2015 there were 3265 registered parents with 4377 registered children and 41 teachers. Today, 2 years afterward, the data shows 7026 parents, 74 teachers, and 10106 children. This platform helps a lot of kids to learn how to read faster and attracts new users every day!