The Requirements
SmartStudy required a suite of educational smartphone apps that would assist GCSE students with their exam revision. The apps would be designed to mirror the students’ curriculum schoolwork, so enabling anytime-anywhere learning. In the first phase of the project, the apps would initially run on Blackberry Smartphones with OS version 5 and higher, and would be rolled out to other smartphone platforms following the second phase.
Each app would comprise of a glossary/mini-encyclopaedia on a given GCSE subject, with content provided by SmartStudy, which would include textual definitions, photos, illustrations and MP3 audio clips on each search term. The apps would also include hundreds of relevant questions per subject area, with scoring to make it easy to identify strengths and weaknesses instantly, so highlighting areas where further improvement could be made by the student.
On Blackberry, the app would further offer a multi-player game and integration with Blackberry Messenger (BBM) in addition to the glossary function.
Finally, the apps were required to support multimedia and sharing via social media so that students could test themselves and their friends using high quality exam board specific content created by accomplished authors.
Our Solution
Blueberry utilised PhoneGap, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Java, Objective-C, ANT, DOS and Shell script to produce a suite of educational apps for Blackberry Smartphones, which supports multimedia, social-media sharing and a games feature. The apps come in several flavours to reflect the needs of each exam board and/or GCSE subject choices.
The Results
Blueberry completed the SmartStudy project on time and in budget.
The free SmartStudy GCSE science wordbook apps not only include a huge amount of granular curriculum based content but each section and topic also contains a quiz, which comprises a number of timed questions with three possible answers to choose from.
The current suite of apps are available from Blackberry AppWorld and have been downloaded 25,000 in the UK at the time of writing, gaining 5 star reviews.
