We’ve recently been working with Education Services Australia (ESA) delivering some interactive, educational iPad apps in ESA’s Maths, Economics and English learning areas. The apps are a fun way for kids to learn using examples they can relate to. The portability and offline caching of the iPad allows the kids to play them anywhere.
Here’s a sneak peek at a couple of the games which we thought were cool. You can check them out here
Fish Market is an interactive trading game teaching kids about supply and demand by selling fish at markets in Australia and New Zealand. The goal is to maximise your profits so you can buy the most sought after fish – The Fizzler.
Talking Dino is a bit of fun – your kids can design their own Dinosaur from scratch, which is then brought to life with an animated display.
The Development Process
The games were flash applications and we redeveloped them for the iPad using Cocos2D for four of them. The other was developed by our web developer, Dougal who used his web skills to come up with a great HTML5 version of the Wishball app. Backbone.js was one of the basic frameworks used for the HTML5 app. Using cocos2d helped us create great interactive apps and nice animations, but we had issues with memory leaks due to the number of assets needed to create the animations. It was a quick fix once we identified where the leaks were happening, but tracking down the leaks (by manually running every class and subclass) was a real mission. Credit to our developer Frank for meticulously sifting the code for those.
We hope your kids will love those little gems.