Apps for Free

Category(s): Education, Games, Kids, Educational

Average User Rating: 2.0

Number of Users Rating: 4

Current Version's Average User Rating: 3.0

Current Version's Number of Users Rating: 2

Description: Picaa: Interactive and Cooperative Platform to Support Learning.

Important: The application is in English (as well as in Spanish) although sample activities provided are in Spanish. You can customize or create new ones with the pictures and sounds you want, including synthesized sounds (Text-To-Speech) in English.

Picaa aims to bring flexibility and adaptability in the education of children with special needs. More innovating factors of the platform are:

- It is designed like a mobile platform, following an approach where activities run on entertainment mobile devices that turn out to be more attractive to users.
- It provides support for group work, fostering integration and interaction with other users.
- It has the capability of user adaptation and content customization.
- It provides functions to synthesize sounds (requires WiFi/3G connection).
- Activities can be shared via email or can be imported/exported via iTunes sharing files feature.

The platform allows defining four kinds of activities to be performed by the users that we have chosen in order to cover the main learning task prompts. These kinds of activities are:

- Association: the student must indicate relationships between elements that belong to several sets.
- Puzzle: a decomposed image must be rebuilt from multiple pieces. Number, size and shape of pieces can be configured.
- Exploration: navigation-based histories that let students learn concepts through the navigation of a hypermedia system with components.
- Sorting/selection: a list of elements that must be ordered in a sequence or where the user must find a particular item.

(*) Sample pictures given by the DiverTIC Association (www.divertic.org).