Hapan - A Kids Learning App

by Sakunthala Muttettugama

Hapan is an edutainment app developed by Hapan Digital Private Limited, specifically for Sri Lankan children within the 2-6 year age range to have an exposure to reading, listening and writing Sinhala and English letters. In addition to the language, the app also facilitates learning to count numbers and drawing basic shapes they encounter in the environments.

The app offers various onscreen activities for the children to navigate by moving their fingers on the touch screen of the devices such as phones, tabs etc. This app provides a support for the children to improve their emerging literacy. The app is available for purchase from the Google App Store and Apple App Store. Nevertheless ,not all the features in the app are freely available. Therefore the user may have to make payments to fully use the app.

The app reads stories to the children with animated visuals. Research suggests that moving animated pictures rather than motionless images, makes it easy for the child to better grasp the meanings and actions represented by the linguistic signs and spoken language. The Hapan app has an attractive imaginary background that matches with a Disney character who appears as the person speaking to the child. The child can learn to write the letters of English and Sinhala with the guiding voice of the character in the display. This guiding voice of the app builds up an emotional connection with the child quickly. This is because the guiding voice uses child-directed language ("Babo") and builds up a helpful friendly image of the guiding character in the child’s mind. This is an effective way to socialize the child into the imaginary world of the character as a member who belongs to the fantasy world of the app.

Moreover, since the voice of the character guides the child through its features and programs, the voice is able to build up joint attention with the child towards the onscreen activities. The Disney character who appears to fly with a magical stick directs the gaze of the child to letters and other objects of the app. The child also gains agency when he/she is able to operate the app and navigate its activities together with the app’s fictional character. The child won't easily get bored in the interactive environment of the app. The character in the app is a constant external motivation for the child because she guides the child through the steps he/she has to perform and engage with when learning letters. The constant presence of the voice in the app helps the child do the activities with less amount of intrinsic effort.

The app has educational games which rewards the child who correctly writes letters, or chooses the correct letters, or recognizes the correct meanings for the corresponding picture. The games function as an implicit assessment for the child to retain what he/she learnt to do. The fictional voice in the app appreciates the child for winning the games and offers feedback for re-correction. Nevertheless, the app has an insufficient variety of rewards which makes the app fall short in maintaining the child’s motivation across a large range of assessments and activities.

The app‘s simple assessment activities in the form of a game to measure the child’s memory is less burdensome and is appropriate to the cognitive level of the children below the age six. Usually, children of this age need an immersive environment to acquire languages and literacy skills. The friendly voice, colloquial language, the absence of a formal classroom environment, and rewards produce an authentic learning/performing space that does not single out and distance the intended skill from the activity. The Generative processing^[1] (as Richard Mayer has concluded in a research on computer-based multimedia instructional materials) enables learning to be deeply absorbed in the mind of the participant by just watching or interactively engaging in the target skill. The app facilitates positive emotions and imaginations to stem from the learning experience. Thereby I believe the app cultivates a positive experience (in children) towards their emerging literacy development.

However, one of the main weaknesses of the app is that It does not have Tamil language. It excludes the Tamil children and disregards the official and national status of the Tamil language in Sri Lanka.

[1] Mayer. R.(2017). Using Multimedia for e-learning.Journal of Assisted Learning, 33(5), 403-423. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12197