I run a Technology lab for close to 300 3-5 year olds for Head Start. I also am the consultant on app purchases for our whole agency of over 1000 students in over 50 classrooms.
I think you may have made the app I have been searching for. Pre-school students needs apps that let them create and not just "glorified work sheets" or some story told to them. I will let you know in the next few weeks how it works in my classrooms :)
I think I might actually need to make that. I am starting to think I need to spread out my consulting to outside sources and there really isn't anything out there to get REAL numbers and real information on apps for pre-k through 3rd grade.
That's awesome, thank you! It will be very interesting to hear the results from you classrooms. My email is per@discofingers.com.
Your students are a bit under our target group, I'll admit that. We've found that pre-school students might struggle with understanding the concept. But they still like to play with the characters and use the voice record functionallity.
Nice. I'm going to put this in front of our resident toddler tonight.
Bit of feedback:
* I would have been willing to put down a couple of bucks up front just to try it out, even without the extras available in-app.
* How about "toddler resistant" mode that disables the sharing, feedback, social buttons? Kids tend to touch and drag all over the place, often seemingly at random. The less they end up in a strange place and are able to figure out the core interface, the better.
Thanks for the feedback!
The monetization is hard to solve. Only thing you can do in the end is to try it out.
Thanks for the tip regarding the "toddler resistant" mode ! We'll consider that for a update.
1up that 'toddler resistant' mode; just got this for my girl's ipad, going to have lots of fun with it and it will be more fun if the music doesn't stop every five seconds because she hit the one button she wasn't supposed to hit again.
This is great. I laughed out loud when I discovered that notes you throw upward off the screen eventually come back down if you throw them straight up. Definitely getting my toddler to play with this.
I have two suggestions: one is a tool/mode that lets you remove a bunch of stuff quickly, and the other is a simple undo mechanism. Since there isn't much instruction, you need to explore by touching, and e.g. when you're testing to see if a three finger gesture does something, you tend to create a lot of unwanted notes and potentially accidentally remove stuff that you overwrite.
Oh man, I just discovered the magic of tapping on an unused instrument on the bottom. Build a sequence using no sax and then start wailing away on saxy bill. Wonderful.
For iPads able to run iOS 6+, you can activate "Guided Access" mode. Apps being run in this mode can have disabled hardware buttons and deactivate certain areas on-screen.
Once the global setting is enabled (Settings > General > Accessibility), triple-clicking the home button activates and deactivates the mode. There is a passcode, distinct from the unlock code, to exit "Guided Access."
I became familiar with this as part of an iPad kiosk project, and when my toddler discovered that iPads exist, it has been very valuable.
Reading their launch diary is very interesting. Most notably they write down how many downloads, and how much revenue they have had and how much is in their bank. Having never done a startup by myself before and often wondering what it's like financially this is a very interesting reading. I will be checking back a day or two from now (their launch) to see what their numbers our.
Also fantastic looking app, if I had an iPad I would download it :)
Thanks! Part of the point with the blog was to show the frustrating situation of seeing the end of the runway come closer and closer, without knowing if the product will make enough money to finance the business by the end of the runway :)
Cute and approachable app :) The music in first demo video, and the pattern-based sequencing reminds me of when I used to compose Mod files on an Amiga 500, which reminded me of Information Society (there as an Amiga on the cover of their "Hack" album), which brought back even more awesome memories.
just paid for full features; i've always loved stuff like this. There's a web app I always liked that was just a grid with one instrument only, just a reverby mallet-sounding instrument (looks like they added drums now) http://tonematrix.audiotool.com/
When you're restricted to just a scale rather than all 12 notes in the full octave available to you, it's just so surprisingly easy to come up with little riffs that sound good.
feature request (hopefully this doesn't sound crazily absurd - also hopefully doesn't come across as rude) -- the ability to string saved tracks together. Run TrackA 4 times, TrackB 2, TrackC 1, TrackD 1, TrackA 4 again, etc. And even perhaps the ability to loop over and reuse arrangements of multiple tracks.
It's not a subscription no. But if our retention mechanism works, and the app is good enough, people who really like it will be able to spend money in it regularly.
Our quote from the blog is more of a fact than a reference to our business model. Cause if we don't make 15K in per month in average by mid-February, we're out of business.
Android only recently released APIs for sound that are accurate enough for these kinds of applications. As the % of devices running Android 5.0 starts increasing, we'll see sound mixing (and similar) apps there too.
While Android's sound APIs before Lollipop did have a very high latency, you could hack around it by doing your audio processing in native code and feeding the APIs PCM. It just sucked.
That said, definitely excited for the new sound APIs. It's been far too long.
It's questionable whether it's worth doing an iPhone version. Most iPad kid apps aren't but I think this one might be worth it, since it appeals to more adults as well. The ability to make ringtones adds a lot of phone appeal too. Certainly much easier and financially rewarding than doing an Android version.
Sharing songs isn't working and I would seriously reconsider limiting it to iPad only. Offering an interface for iPhone would greatly increase downloads.
I think you may have made the app I have been searching for. Pre-school students needs apps that let them create and not just "glorified work sheets" or some story told to them. I will let you know in the next few weeks how it works in my classrooms :)