Many children find studying boring and see no direct result from the effort that they put in. Leading social mobile games, however, use social game dynamics and data to motivate players to keep playing and improve. Many children also find school lessons too easy or too difficult as a “one size fits all” approach is generally taken in schools. Smart software, however, can automatically adapt to ensure each student’s learning is personalised to his or her level of ability. Indeed when you put a tablet in the hands of a student that gives them a social and personalised learning experience and when you give teachers and parents the insight so they can give the right help to the right student at the right time, you transform learning. Adding such features to apps is difficult, time consuming and expensive and although platforms exist to make this easier for independent developers of mobile games, there are no platforms that fill the needs of developers of mobile learning apps. The result is that the most educational apps are single person, client-only experiences, which are not engaging and do not fully achieve their goal to improve the learning success of students. Zzish solves this problem. Zzish is an open infrastructure and toolset for developers to build state-of-the-art social and personalized mobile learning apps. We save developers time and cost by letting them plug into a simple set of APIs that wrap up the complex learning features. We have six modules; Gamification, Classroom Ready, Learner Insights, Adaptive Algorithms, App Analytics and Content Management. We provide the Zzish Learning Hub so that learners, teachers and parents can collect and view their learning results from many different apps in one place. We provide source code for reference apps that developers can use as starting points for their own development and a templated app builder and content market place so that almost anyone can create apps that have a real impact on learning outcomes.

Many children are not motivated to learn as they find studying boring and see no direct result from the effort that they put in. On the other hand leading social mobile games use clever social game dynamics and rich data and analytics to motivate players to keep playing and improve. Adding such features to apps is difficult, time consuming and expensive and although platforms exist to make this easier for independent developers of mobile games, there are no platforms that fill the needs of developers of mobile educational apps specifically and serve that market well. The result is that the vast majority of educational apps are single person, client-only experiences, which are not very engaging for students and thus do not fully achieve their overall goal to improve the learning experience and learning success of students. Zzish is developing an open social mobile education platform to enable any educational mobile app developer to add connected, social, analytics and personalised learning features to their apps in days that would otherwise take them many months to implement. The platform consists of an API and SDK (with five modules, Content, User, Gamification, Personal Learning and Analytics and Monetization), an end user interface, our Learning Centre, for students, teachers and parents to view their learning results and a reference app, Factzz, that illustrates use of the platform and delivers personalised, adaptive learning. Students of all ages will benefit from improved engagement and motivation and thus improved learning as a result of better education apps. Teachers and parents will benefit from being able to access richer analytics and personalised learning across many more apps. Existing educational app developers will be able to make their apps more engaging for students and more informative for teachers and parents and new app developers, big and small, will create innovative new educational apps as a result of lower costs to delivering such apps.

Zzish aims to transform learning by providing a platform for social game dynamics and educational content on mobile devices. Our tests have shown that children try hardest and learn fastest when learning is a an engaging shared game experience with friends and parents. Our goal is to transform the way children learn and deliver dramatic improvements in learning effectiveness. In particular we want to help teachers make learning activities in class much more engaging by turning standard classroom activities into a connected social game experience played on tablets and want to enable parents to proactively engage in their children’s education by playing educational games with their children and getting real-time information on how their children are progressing in school. Our business goal is produce first a generic app, Factzz, that a teacher can used to deliver social mobile game experience in class or for homework on any subject and second the Zzish platform that enables developers to turn any educational mobile app into a connected social game experience with rich statistics and personalised learning. This proof of market study aims to quantify the commercial viability of applications and a platform for social mobile learning in schools and at home.