Luis Sampedro Diaz, an engineer hailing from Spain but now resident in Silicon Valley, cut his professional teeth at Volkswagen, where he wrote code for “things that didn’t exist yet” in cars and picked up seven patents along the way. He left that job a few years ago — borrowing a well-worn phrase of the tech world — to look for something difficult to do. So he turned his attention to children’s apps. Pluto Media, the startup he founded, is launching its latest and most ambitious project yet today as part of the TC Disrupt Battlefield: Koala Band, an iPad app that’s based on a virtual world where kids aged 6-8 years old can go to learn more about music through games. Sampedro Diaz says that this is just stage one: the same platform will be used to introduce a variety of other educational apps down the line. Designing apps for kids can be deceptively hard to do. When content is geared at a younger audience, there is this implication that the consumer will be less discerning, easier to please. But that isn’t the whole story. On a general level, there is the fact that there are a million apps vying for kids’ attention. More specifically, for those who are aspiring to create something beyond a bit of fun, do the apps manage to achieve what they set out to do? Sampedro Diaz and his team at Pluto are set out to tackle the latter of these challenges. “When we looked at the social worlds that have been build for kids already, the biggest are things like Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters, not aimed at education — just mindless, if entertaining, games,” he tells me. “We wanted to fix that problem by making every single one of our games educational.” He says that they wanted to build their apps on a basic premise: that if the app encourages a user to lean forward and create, that will inherently children learn better than an app that does not. He cites an unexpected influence here. “Minecraft has been used to teach so many things,” he says. “And that is because you use it to build.” In Koala Band, kids earn “notes” by playing music games with others, and those notes can then be used to customise songs. Social features also come into play: users take on a koala identity and can only
via TechCrunch
Koala Band Is An App That Motivates My Kids To Play Piano, And That’s Music To My Ears