Launch HN: Tappity (YC S20) – Keeping kids entertained with science
I’m Chad, and I co-founded Tappity (https://www.tappityapp.com) with my friend, Lawrence. We’re building a healthy alternative to Youtube that entertains and educates kids (4-10) with interactive lessons—starting with science!
Tappity’s story began ten years ago when I developed an app for my Biology professor to teach kids about evolution. It was my first time building a product for kids, so I learned a ton about designing for an audience who couldn’t read or sit still for very long. Also, their brutally honest feedback was refreshing! We ended up getting 20,000 downloads, and I learned kids love interactions. After that great experience, I continued to create apps for kids on the side for fun.
About two years ago, parents started paying for one of these apps. Kids loved a segment we had shot on a whim at our friend’s house, in which they could interact with a real live science teacher. Parents were excited, too. We gave them something engaging, fun, and educational for their kids, which is shockingly rare. The sad reality is that 99% of kids apps fall into three buckets: ad-riddled games, cheap & buggy ABC/123 apps, or YouTube. We wanted to do better. Shortly thereafter, Lawrence and I quit our jobs (where we had met) to start Tappity!
We leaned into this idea of live-like experiences. We felt it’d enrich screen time without sacrificing the fun. So, with Tappity, kids don’t just passively watch, they play along and direct our live-action characters on screen. For example, you could tell Haley—our version of Bill Nye—what she should do next in her science experiment, and she would actually do what you say. Unlike traditional TV programs or videos, where you know the person on screen is talking to a million other people, Tappity makes it feel like characters are interacting with just you in real time. Turns out, this format is super engaging. Best of all, kids don’t feel like they’re learning—they tell their parents they're hanging out with Haley!
So far, we’ve produced ~40 hours of original content, and we’re rapidly building out our library. While we shot much of our content initially with an iPhone in my garage, we’ve now graduated to filming with an actual crew at a studio in Los Angeles!
We're excited to share Tappity with the wider HN community, especially those of you with younger kids. With many families still spending a lot of time at home, we're hoping to make at-home learning a bit more fun and bearable. You can download it for free on the App Store [1]. Would love to hear what you think!
Chad, Lawrence, & Tanner
P.S. We also just launched the first online science fair for kids [2] hosted by Kari Byron from Mythbusters to encourage families to do more science experiments at home (and win prizes)! Check it out!
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tappity-interactive-stories/...
68 comments
[ 8.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadBut at the moment, we're focused on making the Tappity experience and product as amazing as possible first before expanding to other languages.
But I tried to give you money to access more than the demo lessons and couldn't. Hit the 3-month sub on my kid's ipad, sent request to parent ipad (mine) to authorize, authorized it, and... nothing. No payment occurred, no access granted, and now even after a re-install that middle option and "restore" both seem to be non-functional. Can still select the other two, but I don't want those and anyway I'm not sure they'll do anything.
[EDIT] I just went to try it again but I created an account a couple days ago in the process of trying to fix it (though it already had one, I think, but I have no idea how it got set up; I guess my kid must have just clicked through some things, so I replaced that nonsense with a real account) and it seems to have reset progress, so, to be allowed to try to pay, now I have to go through some lessons first, unless there's some secret way to get to the payment screen.
Minor issue report uncovered in the process of the attempt: the app uses both portrait and landscape orientations depending on the view, but seems to hardcode which direction is "up" for both rather than letting them flip with the physical device orientation, which is annoying if, say, your device is connected to a charger and needs to sit a certain way. It doesn't even seem to use the current up/down orientation on initial render and then stick to that, which would at least be better than just having up and down hardcoded to specific sides of the screen.
[EDIT 2] Made it through the free part of Human Body, confirmed, 3-month option is still not responding to touches at all.
Excited to hear that your kid is enjoying Tappity so far! Also, thanks for the feedback about the payment page. We'll be adding an access point from the Parents Menu soon.
So sorry to hear about the bug, though. Would you mind emailing us at hey@tappityapp.com? Wanted to ask you a few questions to help us figure out what's going on.
I wonder if someday you could use automate some of the video using something like this Tennis video generator that was shared here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24398474
Our advisor, Björn Jeffery, does a fantastic job breaking down the kids app market, and in this section, summarizes how developers must do better in his blog. [1] The entire four-parter is a great read. [2]
As a team, we've actually talked about how technology can maybe one day create content but we feel there's still something very powerful about a real person talking that can't be replicated with technology yet. That being said, we are building technology that enables us to automate a lot of the interactive video production, which has been fun learning experience so far!
[1] https://www.bjornjeffery.com/2019/06/20/the-kids-app-market-... [2] https://www.bjornjeffery.com/2019/05/31/the-kids-app-market-...
The little achievements and interactive bits were very effective at keeping him engaged. I'm not sure how much he's retaining, and for the multiple choice questions he seemed to just choose things randomly until he could proceed forward, but he definitely picked up at least a handful of random factoids that he'd tell us about later.
I couldn't have been happier about his interest in that instead of Youtube Kids videos. So much content for kids is just dumb stuff that is focused on keeping kids' eyeballs but not on anything else. The educational apps seem to be mostly focused on random simple math problems or spelling. Science-focused content for young kids has been practically non-existent, so we tried Tappity because it was pretty much the only option. We were very pleasantly surprised.
Thanks for making engaging content that I don't feel bad about exposing my kids to. Please make more content.
Also, a great point about kids swiping randomly in order to proceed forward. One thing we're getting better at is explaining why an answer may not be right, so even if a kid chooses an answer randomly, they'll learn why that's not the correct answer.
The problem I have with in-app purchases with kids, is that it's very vague and open ended, and it's getting promoted to my kids. There's no guarantee that pricing will be fair for future content or features. I prefer the initial expense over the lack of transparency. I also prefer the family sharing standard with Apple's Arcade... I can't just pay for an in-app purchase for one of my kids and not the other(s), or there'll be hell to pay.
That's just me though. I'm very happy with Arcade and being able to keep them away from ads / in-app purchases very easily through it.
We think we've created an experience that has universal appeal for almost all kids, so we'd love to expand to other languages in the future.
Most intro astronomy content, K thru undergrad, gets the color of the Sun either simply wrong, or handles it misleadingly. Resulting in even first-tier astronomy graduate students likely knowing it wrong. Clips from Tappity show false color photos and art of the Sun. Which if not handled carefully, is setting kids up for this morass of common misconceptions around Sun color. What might "handled carefully" look like? Good question. Do you know of any context where that gets discussed?
Similarly, the Tappity "exploded" layers of Earth graphic[3] is variously misleading and aphysically colored (better than many). Which is pervasive for such graphics. Do you know of any community which might say "variants of this common graphic abound, variously wrong - let's put in the collaborative effort necessary to create one correct, and open license it"?
Education content for kids often says the Sun warms the Earth. But that's only half the story, and I've never seen content which does the whole. Earth is doing a bbq roll between too hot Sun and too cold deep space. Even young kids might grasp the concept that with something uncomfortably hot, and another uncomfortably cold, you can attain comfort by alternating. But we don't say that. Does anyone know of a setting for "here is a commonly taught story that's incomplete - let's create exemplar content that fills it out"? Cold at night, at altitude, with cloudless skys, especially when dry... it's a story that's actionable, if not cut short.
Chemistry education content is famously bad. Chem ed research describes it using adjectives like incoherent, leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. But now XR content is coming. And some of it is nifty. But much of it is the usual wretched, now in 3D.
There seems a body of badly needed effort and work, very poorly incentivized, that's not getting well addressed. Do these examples bring to mind any efforts to address this need? Thanks!
[1] https://www.facebook.com/480316135473139/videos/821231864714... https://www.facebook.com/tappityapp/photos/a.803595309811885... [3] https://www.facebook.com/tappityapp/photos/a.803595309811885...
The possibility of a children's picture book serving as immunization against misconceptions, BU's "How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses", seems intriguing.
[1] reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1Q_q4f-hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUyVd1pO3nIh [2] paper https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2017/10/Emmons_et_al-2017-Journ... [3] press release https://www.bu.edu/federal/2017/09/29/new-book-by-bu-researc...
Also, as a team, we're really invested in sparking scientific curiosity beyond the screen as well, so it'd be great to have your kids participate in the Junior Science Fair!
As awful as the situation is, it has certainly helped us connect with parents who really need a lot of help right now. But we built and designed Tappity long before COVID and we think it'll continue to be great for families long afterwards, too! :)
Quick user feedback: My daughter tried a course about building an animal. She made choices that produced surprising results ("the eyes are too ugly!") and wanted to go back but she couldn't figure out how - there's no clear back / restart button.
Joking aside, thanks for the feedback and excited to hear your daughter's enjoying Tappity. We're working on improving navigation in our next iteration, taking into consideration usage behavior like kids who may want to pause or restart!