Will the much-coveted 8-year-old market save the industry?
Posted 02.07.2013 at 4:27 pm
3 Comments
To help sustain a floundering business model, newspapers are reaching for new technology. We've seen augmented reality magazines before, and this new one from Japanese newspaper Tokyo Shimbun isn't that different, except for the intended audience: children.
Here's the idea: A kid waves a smartphone loaded with the AR App over the paper, and a cartoon character pops up on the screen to rewrite the old-person language, explain the text, and point the kid toward the most important words.
So, first of all, hooray for innovation! But, second of all, this spurs some questions. Like: If you already have the content, why not just post it online, Tokyo Shimbun? Will any kids actually want to use this? Aren't some newspapers already written so they can be digested by a fairly young audience? Aren't these children on Twitter or something? And so on.
But if it does work, then good way to indoctrinate the kids early. More years for subscriptions that way.
[BBC]
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It's a wonderful idea to help children read and learn. (Some might exploit to feed commercials to children's mind.)
Now, that's a great idea to engage kids by using Augmented Reality. Kids generally don't like reading newspaper. However, if you have some additional features like these then you can easily have more eyeballs or viewership. Since, newspaper is a static object, this is the only to make it live.
I saw something very similar to this in India. The app was developed by AdStuck. Good that most of the print media are associating with AR
It's a nice idea but I don't see many kids willingly reaching out to use this app, because I don't see them looking at a newspaper and saying to themselves, "I want to know what this paper is saying but I don't understand these words. Let me pull out this app."
It's an app geared towards kids but with an adult mindset behind it. It could be good if adults gave homework or assignments and had the child use the app for it. Otherwise, I can't see them using it on their own.
Kids are attracted to fun and novel things -- things that get their imagination whirring. So to encourage them to *want* to learn, you have to make learning fun for them. Encourage them to seek out new material they want to learn more about. For example, my two boys aged 7 and 10, absolutely love this book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BCPQR9U
I read from parts of it every night and they're just filled with questions afterwards. I encourage their questions, and when I don't know something, we look it up together online. This way they learn how to learn as well.