The Secrets of a Pop-up Book

We have all played with pop-up books when we were young. Whether it was the colourful graphics, the sense of surprise or the curiosity over how the pop-up mechanisms work, most of us would have been fascinated by it at some point in time.

With the dawn of touch-screen phones and tablets, people have gotten creative with their usage in many ways. In line with our project topic on children's apps, we have found yet another example of creative usage of tablets for children's educational purposes.

This app, other than letting children play with the movable mechanisms as in a real physical pop-up book, also allows children to learn about how the mechanisms work with an "x-ray goggles" mode that would display the gears and connections behind the moving parts. This would not have been possible with a real physical book, at least not without tearing the book apart. =)

Another advantage of having such apps is the fact that we do not need to worry about the book being torn by over-enthusiastic kids who love to take things apart.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will analyse more of such existing apps for kids and look for existing problems that we can hopefully solve in our project.