Samsung has rolled out more than 40 new interactive edutainment apps in partnership with Singapore developers. These apps will be available on Samsung smart mobile devices.
Overview of content strategy and edutainment apps by Winston Goh, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Communications, Samsung Asia
The 40 new apps are entertaining, intuitive, social and visual in nature and allows users to engage in self-learning experiences, whether at home or on-the-go.
The suite of edutainment apps includes:
- Mandarin Speaking Skills for Kids: comprises speech interactive exercises to build Mandarin speaking skills for kids from Primary 1 to 6.
- Zalairos Adventures: comprises 25 e-books for kids aged between 5-10 years old to improve vocabulary, reading and comprehension skills.
- Skoolbo Core Skills: comprises more than 50,000 questions designed for kids aged between 4-10 years old to improve mathematics and language skills.
- PREPTEST: standardized self-assessment modules and admission guidelines for GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test), SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and more.
Samsung is working with the developer community to promote the creation of interesting educational content.
Hands-on impression
My favourite is the “Skoolbo Core Skills” app from Skoolbo which drills young children on basic words and math concepts without them even realising it.
Colourful graphics are used and the kid feels he’s playing an adventure game.
Answering the drill questions correctly is only part of progressing in the game.
The company commits the tools, resources, technical content and support that app developers require, to create rich applications optimised for its GALAXY range of tablets and smartphones, as well as the GALAXY Note.
The local app developers that Samsung is working with for this range of edutainment apps are B-Secure Technologies, Prep Zone, iQ-hub and Skoolbo.
Some of these apps, such as those developed by B-Secure Technologies and Prep Zone will be made exclusively available on Samsung mobile devices.
Another impressive app is iQ-hub’s “Mandarin Speaking Skills for kids”.
Going beyond basic word recognition, the app is able to grade the accuracy of pronunciation by the user, who reads out chinese characters displayed on the screen.
Various exercises using the word recognition and grading engine are available and it was quite fun even for an adult to go through some of the exercises.
The launch was held at Samsung’s store at Vivocity.
I tried out some of the apps during the launch and it’s quite impressive what our local developers are capable of.
Also launched at the event were Samsung’s two new GALAXY smartphones.
These are the GALAXY beam (S$648) and the GALAXY Ace 2 (S$438).
Both are based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and will be available this month.
The list of Edutainment Applications and their availability date are listed below.
