Monthly Archives February 2020

This week our team refined our product idea in terms of the lead up to our market research report. Our team spent some time discussing what questions we should be asking possible clients and who we will be interviewing. Although we cannot ethically do one-on-one interviews with children, our ideas included parents, teachers, and app developers, researchers and experts.

We discovered during the past week that there was an app already created that promoted news literacy for kids. The app is called ‘News-O-Matic: Reading for Kids,’ after realizing this, we wanted to find out ways to make our product differ or even improve from this app. News-O-Matic is a subscription-based platform that has multiple versions that all encompass ways that teach children how to read in four languages. It’s essential that our product to help children want to read, but we wanted to focus on the promotion of news literacy and create content that will get kids excited about reading the news.

So far, we have reached out to OwlKids, MediaSmarts, Age of Learning, Scholastic Canada. Speaking with these publications will be to gain insight into what is the most popular content that children are reading. We also have contacts with three to five elementary school teachers; we will be asking them what information is being disseminated to children in certain age groups when they are teaching about current events in schools. In this context, it may also be appropriate to ask teachers what is the appropriate content to relay to children and in what manner. For instance, if a teacher was required to discuss a significant historical event (such as 9/11) to a grade five class, what would the content of that discussion entail?

We will also be speaking with parents to understand the habits of our would-be consumers, which are children at approximately ages 6-12. We want to enter these interviews with the most questions as parents will have the most insight into what their child’s interests and needs are. We also understand that every child is different, so we wanted to also include interviews with experts in early childhood development, child psychology and education. So far we have made contacts professors in applied psychology and human development at the University of Toronto.

Our group started off our brainstorming process by listing problems we see in the news business. We then began thinking of solutions for those problems. The problem we discussed in length was media literacy. The successful rise of disinformation is in large part due to the public’s lacking media literacy skills. Many peoples struggle to fact check on their own or distinguish reliable sources from ones that are not. A second component of media literacy is simply exposure to news. The more news you consume, the more likely you are to know what outlets are reputable, what information is likely accurate, and how to seek out information independently. A lot of youth don’t read the news and are not required to do so in school. We decided to focus on this problem specifically for our project.  

Our target audience for our product will be children ages six to 13. We want to introduce children to the news at a young age so that they can grow up to become news-savvy adults. If children get in the habit of following the news, then they are more likely to become high-information adults who are less likely to be duped by questionable sites and anonymous memes. We will be working on developing a platform that takes the news and delivers it in multiple formats at various comprehension levels. This platform would be valuable to news organizations because by the time children using the app are adults, they will be more likely to be invested in journalism and support media organizations with subscriptions.  We will look into potentially partnering with news organizations to deliver this content. 

Our platform will likely stream videos to provide a visual aspect to the platform, especially since young children often require more stimulation to maintain their attention. Additionally, since reading abilities are limited at a young age, a visual component would be necessary. We would also like to integrate a voice user interface for games that test children’s knowledge on the news. 

This product will be subscription-based. As we continue to develop our product, we will need to decide whether there will be using a freemium model, where a version of the app is available free of charge and additional features are provided for paid subscribers.