Mobile apps are sexy, no doubt about it. And I’ll make them if you can convince me why a native app makes the most sense for your idea. There are, of course, many valid reasons to disseminate via the Apple and Google stores. That said, in the world of education where budgets are tight, ideas are experimental and democratization of the experience is critical, I tend to think that web applications are the best path forward in many cases.… at least until a product has gained enough traction to warrant an investment in coding and ongoing maintenance for proprietary platforms. Want an app? Let’s chat.
This was an interesting challenge. This bingo game, developed in collaboration with a national organization that supports professional therapists working with autistic children, integrates with Shopify, Facebook tracking and Apple Pay to allow teachers to purchase physical products to support in-app gameplay. Additionally, this platform launches an HTML5 web application the powers the gameplay both in-app and on the web for non-app / desktop users. This game was initially coded in Swift 3 and is scheduled for upgrade to Swift 4 to support the newest Apple mobile operating systems.
We used the Apache Cordova mobile development framework to create Android and iOS native apps for this multi-award-winning game written in HTML5 and Javascript. Targeting students 8 years and older, this collaboration between a Boston based game design company and a large university across town in Cambridge teaches empathy and ethics in a gamified context. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the one-to-many app export frameworks (i.e., code in one language, publish to Android, Apple, desktop etc.). However, this game did not require advanced graphics rendering or other hardware specific affordances, so the performance and user experience were ultimately quite satisfactory. This piece was part of a larger, bilingual multi-component suite of products, including a website, web application, teacher analytics dashboard and Drupal CMS integration that we also supported.