How we developed an education platform with an award-winning University

In partnership with the University of Canberra, we created two apps for the Australian Department of Education. A variety of activities are included in the apps for children and educators to engage in STEM learning. The aim is to improve outcomes in early learning centres.

The ELSA apps focus on play, encourage active learning, and inspire children to explore and interact with nature. Two-thirds of the ELSA program takes place off-application, according to the ERA model (Experience, Represent, Apply). Instead of focusing on discrete STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), ELSA apps emphasise STEM Practices: the ideas, methods, and values that underlie STEM.

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Play-based activities within the apps encourage children and educators to create their own content (UGC), which reflect their lives and communities. Children's apps for ELSA are available for tablets only.

Children can play many activities within each of the apps we made. As part of our development deliverables, we also created four different characters. Each character has traits and characteristics that make them distinctive and suitable for the topics they represent.

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We developed characters that reflect the diversity within families and communities where the children reside and attend preschool with the ELSA apps. The characters avoid cultural tokenism and gender bias with clothing, colours and hairstyles. This resulted in us creating meaningful, distinct, real and relatable characters for children to interact with.

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Each character developed by Mode was modelled as a stylised humanoid. In order to play full-body and lip-synch animations, we developed a sophisticated rig for each of the characters. ELSA's target age group is very young, so all of the scaffolding and introductory messages had to be voiced over. None of the activities within the app require children to be able to read text. With lip sync animations and voice audio, the young target age group was able to get instructions to play the games on their own. As a result, they could pay more attention to what the characters were saying. Technically speaking, we rigged the mouth by using blend shapes. These covered all the potential mouth poses, which naturalised and emphasised how each character spoke to the player.
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We used a custom plugin to parse audio files into mouth animation expression files. By using this, along with additional eye movements and body gestures, they were able to emphasise what the characters said to children during ELSA activities.

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To teach young children STEM concepts, we developed two apps for children. The first app we made introduced the concept of understanding patterns and arrangements. Children learned this through various activities including ordering a day's activities, stringing together decorations, singing and dancing exercises, and sorting healthy food items into lunchboxes.

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The app activities in ELSA by their design allow for kids to play and learn freely, being taught various STEM concepts. Some activities allow children to play individually or in small groups. Other activities encourage play off-app as part of a group activity. The flexibility of content we delivered to the client enabled educators to choose activities that suited resources and requirements in the learning centre.

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The second app we developed for ELSA covers understanding spatial terms, such as over, under, on top of, underneath, etc. Within the app, children could play hide and seek, explore the zoo, arrange books and objects on bookshelves, and take photos (to comprehend points of view) in a playground setting.

In the hide and seek activity, Augmented Reality (AR) was used appropriately to teach educational content, rather than a form of gimmick. AR allowed for a small group of children to be motivated to play together and practise using spatial terms in a real world activity.

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As part of the hide and seek activity, one of the children hides one of the animal cards. The children then tell the other children where they hid the marker. Children can then present the marker to the app once it has been located. This reveals a 3D image, with high-quality animations and limited interaction, as well as some educational information. The purpose of this is to reward the group.

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