On Making Montessori Apps for the iPhone

L'Escapadou have developed three apps to date. Word Wizard, Montessori Crosswords and their latest app, Montessori Numbers. All three exhibit the Montessori principles of self expression and exploration. They are apps that allow for the natural desire of children to explore letters and numbers to be enhanced. Word Wizard is still one of my favorite apps to support early childhood literacy.

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L'Escapadou as you can probably tell from the name is a French. They develop children's apps for iOS devices that adhere to the Montessori theory of education.

You may have heard of Montessori, it is a learning philosophy that is particularly embraced and well suited to early childhood and elementary education because these programs were developed during the lifetime of the woman who developed the approach, Maria Montessori. Maria was an Italian physician and educator who explored an educational model that aligned with human and psychological development. It is a method that trusts the learner, that allows for learning through exploration of environments, self expression and open-ended learning. This means that Montessori apps are those that provide children with digital environments that they can come to orientate themselves in, learn to explore and manipulate to create their own work and learning, or as Maria Montessorui would say "purposeful activity".

L'Escapadou have developed three apps to date. Word Wizard, Montessori Crosswords and their latest app, Montessori Numbers. All three exhibit the Montessori principles of self expression and exploration. They are apps that allow for the natural desire of children to explore letters and numbers to be enhanced. Word Wizard is still one of my favorite apps to support early childhood literacy. It offers several ways to use the basic functionality of touching a letter and hearing its sound, the best being the sandbox style word creation environment where you physically move letters around a screen and can create any word you like. You can build whole sentences if you wish, and it has a clever and amusing function for editing inappropriate words.

Word Wizard probably uses the functionality and offering of touchscreen devices best, as it isn't a simulation, but a whole new way of moving letters and sounds and building words and vocabulary, while learning phonics. Montessori Crosswords and Montessori Numbers are really well designed, and not garish or excessive in their use of congratulatory remarks or bold colors and characters. However, they are apps that simulate existing functions, which are important and useful. As the team write about Montessori Numbers:

Maria Montessori believed “what the hand does, the mind remembers”. By using concrete materials during the early, sensitive years, kids taught in a Montessori environment internalize the basic concepts of mathematics more easily. Montessori Numbers is inspired from several traditional Montessori activities and offers concrete hands-on learning materials that make abstract concepts clearer.

I am fascinated by this concept, the way the kinesthetic and the moving of the body and hands aligns to our ability to learn and remember. What might this mean for younger children who still find it difficult to hold a pencil and write, but who can shift letters around a screen and read words. Will we see word recognition and reading happening in children early because of their ability to use apps that are built around the ideas of Maria Montessori? We will have to wait and see how this whole touchscreens and young children experiment we are all a part of goes.

L'Escapadou are a terrific mum and dad developer who have demonstrated how well the App Store model can support innovative development from small teams who are committed to a certain idea or approach. Their work has a maturity in the space because they come from such a strong background and understanding of their educational theory. They don't need to have bells and whistles, or badges, or a voice over saying "good job" every time you get an answer correct. They know their apps meet the needs of children who are programmed and want to learn. They deserve every success and much attention in the way they go about developing quality apps for children.

In the meantime, I had the chance to ask Pierre Abel who runs the show at L'Escapadou a few questions. His answers are both from the heart and enlightening. Please read on and learn more about the approach and purpose of this great children's app development team.

Daniel Donahoo: What is it that drives L'Escapadou to create apps for children?

Pierre Abel: Our kids! We (my wife and I) started creating apps for our homeschooled kids when the iPad was introduced, with the belief that the iPad could be a great tool for learning and creativity. As a homeschooling family, we are looking for learning activities that our kids loves, because we believe that kids learn better when they play and have fun. So our goal is to create this kind of apps on iPad and iPhone. It is also highly exciting to design educational apps, and imagine how we can use the latest technologies to make learning fun and effective.

__Donahoo:__Your apps deliver purposeful interactivity that is aligned to learning in that it actively requires children to create and build their knowledge and learning. How much thought do you put into this and what is the process?

Abel: It is an iterative process that usually takes 4 to 6 months. We start by choosing a non-digital learning activity that one of our kid loves - and up to now,it is a Montessori activity because we've got a lot of Montessori materials at home. It is important to note that we start from a "proven" activity that has demonstrated educational values. Then, we think how we can add adapt this activity for touch screens, and add some magic thanks the iPad/iPhone. The magic can be split in two categories : the "pure fun" features and the "facilitator" features. "Pure fun" is to simply to make the app appealing for kids (e.g. nice graphics, animation, sounds,...). "Facilitator" features are the most important, and the ones that add some smart behaviors to the app so that they help kids to learn more efficiently (e.g. when the child touches a number, the app says its name). The "Facilitator" features have always a highest priority, and we think carefully about what the app should do -and should not do- to help the child to learn efficiently (e.g. too much animations or sound may distract the child sometimes). We do a lot of prototyping and short iterations (at least 30) to test the app with our kids and their friends, and get some feedback from Montessori teachers and others parents. And once we're happy with the result, we release the app.

__Donahoo: __How important is it to not just provide apps that have a selection of answers to choose from, but rather ask the child to develop and build their own answer from the tools you provide?

__Abel: __It is based on our belief that kids learn better when they can experiment and play (and it's not only our belief because it has been shown in numerous publications). The child must take over concepts and for that he needs to play with them (and make errors). An interesting example is the quizzes that we provide in Word Wizard (parents can create quiz list with the words they want) : for us it is important that the child enters the right spelling every time, and not wait for the end of the quiz to know if it is right or wrong. So there is no "OK" button available to let the child tell the app that he thinks that it is the correct spelling. Actually the app will go automatically to next word only once the correct answer is entered. This way, it allows the child to experiment with different spelling and build the correct spelling in any case ( of course the child can ask for some hints if he can't find the correct spelling).

__Donahoo: __What do you see as the future for children's educational apps?

__Abel: __I currently wondering how social features (i.e. allow to see others kids who are playing, discuss with them,...) could be added to educational apps in a way that help kids to learn even more effectively. I see that my kids are very engaged and are learning a lot with their friends when they play, and I think it could be a nice feature to engage kids even more in educational apps. However, it is a really delicate subject because of privacy issues.

__Donahoo: __What is your response to the many simulation apps that crowd the market, the thousands of simple ABC apps or maths apps that simply simulate maths sheets?

__Abel: __Our response is innovation. We take a lot of times to design and test our apps (we release an app each year even if I work full-time on apps) and make sure this is something new and different ,and that it offers a lot of educational values.

__Donahoo: __Can you explain to readers how the Montessori approach aligns well with touch technologies?

__Abel: __One important thing in the Montessori way of learning is to let kids deal with materials (e.g. movable alphabet,beads,...). These materials have been carefully designed, as well as learning activities that use these materials. Kids must manipulate materials to learn concepts, and touch technologies aligns well with that because they allow a real, direct interaction with the virtual materials, without requiring another device such as a mouse. In addition, adding smart behavior to the virtual material can really help kids to grasp some concepts associated with the material. To finish, just let me say that Montessori philosophy is really more than just the materials - but that is a whole other subject.

__Donahoo: __What can we expect from L'Escapadou in the future?

__Abel: __We want to continue to create learning activities for the iPad and iPhone, and the next one is not decided yet. We have many ideas but we want to be sure to choose the good one, and to focus on it. The good one is the one that is useful for one of our kids, and where we see opportunities to leverage technologies to create a fun and educational app.

You can find all L'Escapadou's apps over at their website.