Kid-Friendly Tutorial Creator

Hands-on, student-centered classrooms let students create and invent. When students create or invent something especially interesting, peers and teachers ask, “How did you do that?” When words alone do not suffice, or when students are too young to write explanations, what are the best tools for helping students share and reflect on their design process?

Screenshot used with permission from Snapguide.

The Snapguide IOS app provides a simple way to photograph and share steps in a process. One can also rearrange their order and add text if necessary. Capturing screenshots as opposed to photographs requires several run-around steps not worth one’s time, but Snapguide otherwise leads the pack.

Unfortunately, Snapguide isn’t made for children. As a matter of fact, Snapguide’s privacy policy bans anyone under the age of 13 from using its services. Presumably, this is because the way Snapguide handles user data does not comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Complying with COPPA poses challenges, especially for businesses that profit mainly from the user data they collect, but developers willing to reach out to the users Snapguide turns away stand to gain a lot. Google Apps For Education and VoiceThread help to illustrate how businesses complying with COPPA can thrive.

One alternative to Snapguide for students under 13 is Skitch, a desktop and mobile app from Evernote. Sktich users can capture photographs or computer screenshots and annotate them with boxes, arrows, and text. Skitch also offers useful tools for cropping and blurring parts of images. (The latter proves useful when a screenshot includes email addresses or other details that one might want to keep private.) For the purposes of young students, though, Skitch is overcrowded with features. It also requires toggling between apps. To organize images into a series and to share them, one would need to open another app (Evernote or Google Apps work best) and then to perform several additional clicks. Although I have seen a few Grade 3 students successfully create guides with Skitch, the process is too complicated for the majority of young students.

Snapguide and Skitch point the way to an in-demand app that has not yet been created. It would have the following characteristics:

• Integration with Google Apps For Education or a similar platform. This would create a COPPA-compliant way for young students to share their work.
• Simple means of capturing images. Capturing photographs is essential and is easy to accomplish with a mobile app. Capturing computer screenshots would be useful, too, especially if it didn’t require toggling between apps. (Could a mobile device accomplish this through mirroring technology in the style of Chromecast or through a photo-editing algorithm that might cut the glare and ugliness out of photographs of computer screens?)
• The ability to automatically organize images into a numbered series.
• Optional: Arrows, text, cropping.

What’s in it for developers?

In terms of popularity, this could become the next Instagram. It would be useful for school purposes (and schools might pay money in a freemium pricing structure, as they do for VoiceThread), but students who discover the app in school might also enjoy using it at home. Guides on subjects like Minecraft, skateboard tricks, and silly cat stuff might abound. A broad base of users might graduate to a general-consumer version of the app in the same way that young users of Google Apps For Education graduate to Google+ and the general-consumer version of Gmail.