The Walt Disney Company is launching a new line of learning tools designed to help parents encourage kids aged 3 to 8 to learn outside of school. Disney Imagicademy begins with a series of mobile apps but will later expand into other products such as books and interactive toys. Over time, the target age will also grow to include older kids.
To begin with, Disney is launching an iPad app called “Mickey’s Magical Math World” on 11 December, focused on math-based activities such as counting, shapes, logic and sorting. Within the app, there are five add-on activities such as “Minnie’s Robot Count-Along” and “Goofy’s Silly Sorting.” The basic app is free to use, but the enhanced activities cost $4.99 each or $19.99 for all five. Future apps, on subjects ranging from life science using characters from Disney’s Frozen to creative arts, will be similarly priced. The apps are ad free, keeping with laws that prevent targeting online advertising at kids under 13.
A companion app, Disney Imagicacademy Parents, lets grown-ups follow along with what their kids are doing even if they are using a separate mobile device. The parents app provides a wealth of features to support their children’s educational development, including an accessible way to facilitate an ongoing conversation with their child about what they are learning and functionality to receive real-time updates about their children’s progress. It also suggests a bevy of offline activities, such as creating “rocket racers” using toilet paper tubes, duct tape and balloons, or making a colourful “quilt” out of tissue paper to learn shapes.
Disney’s entry into the learning app market comes at a popular time for educational apps, thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices and as more parents grow comfortable letting their kids use them, at least with certain limits.
Disney Publishing Worldwide, the creator of Imagicademy and also the world’s largest publisher of children’s books, hopes that its content will meet the high-quality barrier that is entertaining as well as educational. Disney is betting that its brand recognition and the quality of its apps will help them stand out from a crowd of more than 100,000 learning apps aimed at kids. There are other big name brands in the learning app space, including Sesame Street.Internationally renowned expert on the development of mathematics understanding in young children and a member of Disney Imagicademy Board of Advisors, Douglas H Clements believes early math experiences are an essential part of building confident leaders. He said, “Such experiences are surprisingly important to children’s development not only of mathematics topics, but of higher-order thinking skills and general success in school. I am pleased that Disney Imagicademy is helping to produce those experiences with research-driven curriculum and high-quality game.”
Disney Consumer Product president Bob Chapek said that the company’s insight from parents made them aware about the difficulty to find high quality apps among the thousands out there and even if parents did find one, those apps didn’t have any logical progression to other levels and subjects.
“What really makes (Imagicademy) different is that it’s done with a very compelling curriculum-based approach. And the fact that it’s based on characters and mythologies that kids love,” he said.
Shortly after the math app, Bob says Disney will launch a creative arts portfolio, then science, reading and social skills. The latter, he says, is “the outgrowth of our work with experts” who specialise in early childhood education and believe that social skills are as important as the “1, 2,3,4,5 things” when it comes to learning.
The second suite of digital apps in the Disney Imagicademy line-up is Mickey’s Magical Arts World that will be available on the Apple App Store for download in January 2015.
Physical products and learning toys will launch in time for back-to-school 2015, featuring forward-thinking and innovative brands at the intersection of technology and play, including Smart Toy, Kid Designs, Wonder Forge and Mercury Active.
