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.
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