Do you have an android phone, but still enjoy using an iPad from apple? Maybe you have an iphone, but your colleagues are all on android.
Today, everyone uses different devices. Some folks are on old phones, some new. Sometimes in one household you will find one spouse on apple, another on android, and the kids on a third.
Yet, if you find an amazing educational app, you still want to be able to easily share it with your students and colleagues. Even though everyone has a different type of phone in their hand, we all want to have the confidence that this great tool we found will work across all the myriad of devices out there.
This is one of the biggest digital development challenges we have at Behrman House: making the apps and games we create work on all mobile devices seamlessly so that a teacher can confidently assign their class to use a tool, without worrying that some students won’t be able to access them.
Making games/apps that fit multiple screen sizes and work well on many different operating systems is a tough challenge—there’s even a technical name for it: “fragmentation”. Android in particular is very fragmented-- it’s is all over the place! As you can see from the chart below, Android has 3,997 distinct devices as of August of 2012 (and it’s growing every day).
Each of the thousands of boxes in the chart above represent a different type of device from Android—even those tiny ones.
So how do we make a universal game/app like Unlimited Alef Bet work on so many different devices?
GameSalad to the rescue. GameSalad is a development tool that allows non-programmers to create and publish games across many varied platforms.
However, even though, Game Salad can be very useful, it is still limiting and only allows developers to create a certain amount of features. For more options, I prefer working in development platforms, like Xcode with cocoa touch. It offers developers the most power and capabilities.
In the case of our app, Unlimited Alef Bet our main objective was to develop a simple Hebrew letters game that would work on as many mobile devices as possible. This made GameSalad the best choice.
Additionally, using GameSalad allowed us to create something that can really empower digitially minded students: we developed a template that gives them the opportunity to become their own game designers. They can take Unlimited Alef Bet and customize it by adding additional Hebrew words that they choose themselves to extend the game.
In fact, the part of developing Unlimited Alef Bet that I am most proud of is mentoring and working with a young talented artist, animator, and future developer Conor (C. A. MacFinn), who created all the Hebrew letters and animations for Unlimited Alef Bet.
We discovered Conor through the application he submitted to us at jLearningLabs.com.
If you or one of your students has an interest in game development and would like to participate we invite you to fill out an application at jLearningLabs or contact us directly.
You can find out more about Unlimited Alef Bet here. You can also download it for free from the Apple App Store, Google Play, or Amazon Appstore.
