Energetic Alpha, Playful Handwriting Practice for Children

Young children are enamored by screens, especially iPads and mobile devices. Apple's App Store offers close to 100,000 products aimed at young children. Many of the apps are poor quality and include in-app advertising, deficient navigation, or overly gamified elements that compete with content. Extraneous animations, sound effects, and tangential games might be appealing to a child when activated but do not add to the child's understanding of the primary content because they disrupt the coherence of the learning experience and the child's engagement? (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015, p. 12). In an effort to create an educational but entertaining experience we developed an iPad application called Energetic Alpha. This interactive app teaches letter writing to children by using motion design and video content to educate and reward.