1. The Story
Teaching kids letters through an app is not a new concept. It has been around for a while. So what new can distinguish our app from others? What could help Bengali kids living abroad learn their mother tongue easily through fun and interactive tools? – brainstormed Sandip Saha and Swarnendu De, co-founders of Innofied. And Barnoparichay was launched in March 2015 on the App Store and Play Store with an interface replicating the old-school slate-pencil based learning experience. The app allows children to read, write and practice with virtual color pencils and eraser.
“Very good app. When I downloaded this 1 year ago, there were some features, most of them are paying versions but now all are free. My daughter loves to listen to rhymes very much.” – Chandan Kumar Maiti
2. The Challenge
Our first challenge was to keep the app interface minimalistic yet maintain the feel of a traditional school classroom with the use of slate-pencil concept. We wanted to make it easy for our users to make corrections in their writing just the way they would in a real-life slateboard. So we introduced an erasable duster element. We used memory management to process a huge number of images at a time.
“Good app for kids. Thanks for making this type of app. Carry on.” – Jahangir Alam
3. The Solution
Our designers introduced a variety of colors and cartoons to brighten up the interface for its target audience – toddlers. To boost the performance and bring smoothness in the slate-board-and-chalk interface, we used core graphics (GPU for processing, using OpenGL ES 2.0 Framework). To make Barnoparichay even more exciting , we introduced a “Listen And Choose Correct Alphabet” feature aimed to improve the listening skills of little learners. In the Bengali version, we added a rich collection of popular Bengali rhymes, complete with colorful illustrations and audio clips.
With more than 50,000 app downloads, Barnoparichay received the Engage Digital Summit Award under the category Best Mobile Application Development and Use.