The Solar Family app is an adaption of a kids story – Comet meets the Solar Family. The story is about the Solar System presented in a way kids can relate with in their daily lives. The story passes on a couple of good messages for children to understand the society better. The learning passed on through the story is limited to the scope of the formation and current functioning of the Solar System but very little information about the various planets and their characteristics.
The app takes the entire story experience to a different level. Various pages in the story have been modified to add challenges that encourage the child to navigate through the entire story and fun games that keep them hooked on. The application also takes a step further in the educational aspect of the story by allowing the kids to interact with the planets. These interactions shed more light about the characteristics of the various planets as we know them today. At the same time, certain text pop-ups challenge the kid’s knowledge thus leading them to ask more questions about the Solar System.
All these planets have been assigned characteristics that could be related to their actual sizes, for example – Mercury is the smallest planet and it behaves as such during the various interactions throughout the story. Similarly, Neptune being the coolest planet is projected such. These properties assigned to planets come with emotional and fun-to-look-at addons encouraging the young ones to interact more often. The navigation through the story is full of challenges that a kid needs to accomplish in order to proceed to the next page. Some challenges use physics, while some others drive children to exercise their motor skills.
Another interesting value addition noticed in the application was the correlation of planet names with their appearances. Each time a planet name is used within the story or during interactions, it is displayed in such a way that kids can relate the object with the text. Lastly, a very important observation was the fact that the entire story can be navigated through by children without knowledge of the English language, which means, the app also serves a purpose of teaching the language.
