Sarah Towle and Bluespark Labs Join Forces to Power Up the Time Traveler Tours App Publishing Engine

Newsflash! On 24 March 2014, at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, I will be announcing the official launch of my twin digital imprints, Time Traveler Tours & Tales. Finally!

I wanted to share the news first with my dedicated blog readers.

Team TTT&T now joins forces with Ronald Ashri and the creative digital development agency, Bluespark Labs, to power up the Time Traveler Tours concept and vision with a spanky new app publishing engine.

Blending the talents of our respective teams, we will collaborate to unite the best in interactive storytelling with the latest in mobile technology to revolutionize the discovery of history and culture, and along with it, educational tourism.

Or aim: To produce interactive mobile tours—both branded as well as white-label—to the world’s most popular historic destinations, museums, and other cultural institutions. Content for our branded StoryApp iTineraries will spring from the interactive iTales now under development under the aegis of Time Traveler Tales.

Our target audience: Youth. And the young at heart.

Our mission: To bring history and culture to life through story and games, at the tips of your fingers.

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Time Traveler Tours mobile publications usher users on treasure hunts through time, guided by history’s most colorful characters. Our debut StoryApp iTinerary, ParisAppTours: Beware Madame la Guillotine, A Revolutionary Tour of Paris, earned numerous Top 10 App distinctions and garnered stellar reviews, such as this one by Daryl Grabarek, reviewer for School Library Journal's Touch & Go, Guide to the Best Apps for Children and Teens:

“Drama of historical proportions, an awesome guide, and games and challenges, what more could a teen on vacation ask for?”

The award-winning story kicked off the creation of a suite of digital products—for tablet and eReader— along with the birth of a second digital imprint, Time Traveler Tales. Our eTales will also be available for print, on demand through Amazon. With our stories now traversing the formats, we are able to bring quality interactive content to all readers where they want it most.

A growing alliance of authors of narrative nonfiction and historical fiction is now fast at work, helping to position Time Traveler Tours & Tales to scale its unique concept worldwide. And to our great fortune, Bluespark Labs boasts a special affinity for international travel and culture. Merging thoughtful user experiences, beautiful interface designs, and powerful web and mobile platforms, they design and build apps that people love.

Bluespark Founder & Principal, Michael Tucker, was taken with the Time Traveler Tours concept from the early beta-testing days of the Beware Madame la Guillotine StoryApp iTinerary, when he accidentally shared a day out and about in Paris with Sarah and her story’s protagonist, Charlotte Corday.

Now he and his partner, Ronald Ashri, have engaged their team to power up the Time Traveler Tours app publishing engine with state-of-the-art features and functionality. You can meet the whole team here.

The coming technical platform will enable Team TTT&T to produce interactive mobile media at a competitive cost. This will include content published under the Time Traveler Tours trademark, as well as that tailor-made to highlight the historical legacy of museums, monuments, and other cultural institutions, worldwide.

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Cultural Institutions: Are you looking for an affordable solution to building interactive apps and other educational media for your organization? You need search no further. Engage us! It's what we do best.

Authors: Do you have a dramatic historic tale to tell? Consider joining Team TTT&T! We are open for submissions.

For more information about our collaborative opportunities for authors and organizations, contact me!

 

The 13th Annual Dust or Magic Institute: Magic-Making Factor #4

Technology + Learning Theory + Play Theory = Magic.

A major focus of the Dust or Magic Institute is to bring educators and technologists together in the same space, and to provide the latter with a crash course in Childhood Development. Why? So that they may create age- and developmentally-appropriate products for kids, steeped in sound educational theory. The most important one being that all of us, kids and adults alike, learn best through play.

As a teacher of 20+ years, I was gratified to discover educational theory being applied to children’s interactive media in this way.

However, lacking in the above equation, I felt, was the time-honored lesson to be drawn from the world of children’s publishing: that the visual element serves a valuable role too, and one often neglected in today's interactive media for kids.

As a children’s author and a connoisseur of picture book art, I was shocked by the low visual quality of some of the media products we studied at Dust or Magic. Many of them, I’m sorry to say, were just plain ugly, with illustrations that looked little better than clip art.

Anyone working on behalf of children must appreciate the role that great illustration plays in communicating with and teaching children. In illustrated books, the story and images weave seamlessly together to create something better than the sum of their parts. Indeed, great illustrations tell at least 50% of the story and can make an already great text shine even brighter.

Yet, this is not often the case in today’s digital products.

Not all children’s digital media will contain story. They don’t all have too. But digital media are nothing if not visual. It is imperative, therefore, that we developers make our products visually appealing. To make them works of art.

Beware Madame la Guillotine, for example, is illustrated with great period masterpieces as well as propaganda and popular lithographs dating to the French Revolution. While we place an emphasis on the history as revealed by the story and accompanying treasure hunts, and not on the art per se, the app is also a subtle lesson in Art History. And we trust that this will be understood on some level by each of our user/readers. 

Our kids deserve the total package. It’s not enough to be age appropriate and steeped in sound educational theory. Our products must also be beautiful.

Nosy Crow and Touch Press set the standard in this regard, as do the apps by OCG Studios, illustrated by Roxie Munro. Their products combine great storytelling with gorgeous illustrations, topped off with interactive gaming elements that enhance the narrative and extend learning.

At the Dust or Magic Institute, participants rate demoed products on a scale of one to ten – one being “dust” and ten being “magic”. Judging criteria are not provided, so it’s hard to know what’s behind each participant’s decision. But I'll admit to aiming my laser beam low (see video above for explanation) for any product – even the most educationally sound – if it did not deliver a quality visual experience as well.  

As a children’s author, app developer, educator, and burgeoning digital publisher, I feel most days as if I am contorted on a Twister board, struggling to maintain a viable position; or drifting the northern seas with each of my two feet and hands clinging to a different iceberg, each ice floe representing one the four elements -- educational theory, great story content, and compelling visuals -- I hope to bring together in my ambition to produce quality interactive product for kids.

But it can, and must, be done. As Warren Buckleitner, himself, beseeched us at the close of the 2013 Institute: “Go forth and do right by the kids!”

It is my hope that developers of children's interactive digital media will take a minute to hire a proper illustrator for their future projects. Following on that, I hope that the opening equation of Dust or Magic 2014 be modified as well to read Technology + Learning Theory + Play Theory + High Quality Visual Art = Magic.

What do you think? Should digital media for kids honor a visual aesthetic? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think.

To Learn about Magic-Making Factors #1-3, Click Here.

The 13th Annual Dust or Magic Institute: Magic-Making Factors #1-3

For 14 years, researchers, reviewers, and thought leaders in the world of interactive media for kids convene at Dust or Magic events to discuss, dissect, discern, and determine where the magic lies – and where it doesn’t – in digital products for youth.

They are helping to chart the way forward for our field, while providing tried-and-true advice to developers as to what constitutes developmentally appropriate learning tools for young people.

I was thrilled to be a part of the Institute for the first time this year.

The overarching goal of the Dust or Magic Institute, I quickly learned, is to define the factors that contribute to making child-focused interactive digital media – whether apps, games, TV, web-based tools and programs, eBooks or toys – worthy of our esteem or otherwise, that is: Magic or Dust.

Products are demoed, analyzed, and critiqued through the lens of childhood development, learning theory, and what can be considered educational play.

At Dust or Magic, the judgments aimed at today’s offerings are binary. But that’s not to say it's all clear-cut. For the world of children’s interactive media is in its infancy – the equivalent of the silent picture show days in the evolution of film – and what makes something “best in class” is changing all the time.

Factors that made magic even five years ago may tend toward dust today. As the devices (hardware) evolve, so must the software, and with it the content. As we learn more about what we can do with our tools, so too expand the myriad options that suggest what we can do with pictures, stories, words, and games to engage and educate young people and lay the foundation for lifelong learning.

Magic-Making Factors #1, #2, & #3

One conclusion we reached this year is that the earliest digital products sought to create one-to-one relationships with users, mirroring the experiences one might have with a book. Also like the book, these products tended to be linear.

Today, however, the strongest products succeed in bursting linear boundaries. They also encourage group experiences and empower users to jump off the screen and relate to each other and their environment.

This can be seen in the many offerings of Toca Boca that inspire creative parallel play among the pre-school set, the screen being their starting point. In Tinybops’ brilliant interactive exploration of the human body, aimed at an older audience, navigating through the app is anything but linear. The same can be said for most of the apps coming out of Touch Press, including their latest: Disney Animated. And Time Traveler Tours’ own innovative approach to educational tourism, in which the screen and story launch users into an exploration of their physical surroundings, was also validated.

The video above shows me demoing not just Beware Madame la Guillotine, but the Time Traveler Tours & Tales concept in general. We came out with a strong 7 out of 10. Pretty good for a first-timer at the Dust or Magic institute, don't you think?

I hope you’ll take a look at it and give us your rating.

Do you have any questions about Dust or Magic? Ask them in the comments. I’ll be happy to address them in future posts. Meantime, stay tuned. More #DustorMagic musings to come!

All best, Sarah

Tools of Change at Dust or Magic

It's conference time again and I'm off! This time to...

...the annual Institute of designers, researchers, and reviewers of interactive media (IM) for children and youth.

So stay tuned for blog posts from historic Lambertville, New Jersey, including:

• updates on the latest product releases and their use in schools;

• observations on the intersection between child development theory and emerging interactive teaching-and-learning tools;

• highlights on what's new in interactive design; and

• interviews with others who are passionate about the potential of interactive media for children

Meanwhile, I invite you to check out my blog post in O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing about the 3rd, and last, TOC Bologna Conference, where I met many of the fine folks who are the magic behind Dust or Magic.

Your comments welcome!

A Brief History of StoryApps and Interactivity

In July 2008, Apple launched the App Store, 1 1/2 years after the release the first iPhone, an event that would change the world of publishing forever.

At that point, software applications, aka apps (i.e., task-specific coded programs or utilities for end users), had existed for some time, since the birth of the computer. But their numbers were few. And never before had they been powered and run on a hand-held device that tripled as personal compu-
ter, music player, and phone.

The iPhone unleashed an industry more vast and far-reaching than even Steve Jobs had anticipa-
ted. New apps exploded onto the market, simpli-
fying life's daily tasks in ways we didn't know we wanted but now can't live without.

Apple discovered it needed a way to manage and benefit from the new cultural paradigm it had started, while also offering third-party developers and early adopters a place at their party. At that time, the App Store was the place to be and be seen.

By April 2010, the company changed the game again, as well as the party dress code. This time, it was the release of the iPad that brought new categories to an expanded App Store. Among these new categories: Children's Books.

And thus, the StoryApp genre was born. 

Humankind's newest storytelling genre, the StoryApp has since been trialed and tested and nurtured into its own as intrepid developers, authors, and publishers have struggled with, and learned, how best to make use of the form. From their initial attempts to recreate the book on the screen, these early adopters have much to teach us about how mobile and tablet devices can be used to enrich and extend story content as well as educate a new generation of tech-savvy young readers: today's "digital natives".  

In this Brief History of StoryApps and Interactivity, I attempt to illustrate through real-world examples the evolution of the StoryApp form, from its earliest flawed iterations to today's blockbusters. And with it, I hope to set the stage for more in-depth video views and reviews on the ground-breaking, earth-shaking, entertainment-making StoryApps of today... and tomorrow.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the StoryApp pioneers. I include their products herein not to criticize, but to demonstrate what we may learn from their efforts to help us best usher our story content into an interactive future.

My thanks to all the developers, authors, illustrators, publishers, etc., featured this video. And to a whole host of others besides.

More soon,
Sarah