My sister-in-law’s 8-year-old son, Tobey, has severe learning disabilities due to autism. Tobey’s mom, Jany, found the iPad a useful tool for teaching Tobey, but shortcomings with apps for kids with special needs inspired her to create some apps of her own. After discussing some ideas, we decided to collaborate on a simple counting app based on the Montessori 100 Board, which uses symmetry and patterns to help reinforce relationships between numbers for young learners.

Initial concept
Interaction design
Programming using Corona SDK

Our primary audience for this app was kids with special needs, but as we did research on the kinds of design features that work for this audience, we found that young children in general, and their parents, were closely related secondary audiences. We learned from parent feedback and Jany’s own experience that our audiences don’t like to fiddle with settings every time the app launches, they don’t want accidental touches to derail the activity (especially for kids with impaired motor skills), and they don’t like external web links that take you away from the app. This information helped drive our design decisions to keep the app simple and direct so that kids could jump right in and get to the counting.

Since Jany lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, we used Google Docs to collaborate on the design documentation. Once we had the interaction design worked out, she had her friend, Dhania Kumara, create the visual design and assets for us. Then I used the Corona SDK, a development platform for mobile devices, to build an iPad app for distribution in the App Store.

Development took us longer than anticipated, as this was a side project and I was figuring things out as I went. But once we had a working version Jany could install on her iPad, it was very rewarding to see videos of Tobey and other kids at his school using it. Best of all, Jany said it’s helping Tobey to better understand numbers, counting, and sequencing. Now it’s available in the App Store, so we hope that other parents, teachers, and kids find it useful as well.