If you caught our App Friday promotion on April 22nd, you might have seen a the Clean Energy Hawaii STEM app which focuses on environmental education. Our feature today is written by one of the three developers of that app: Krishna Narayan, President and Founder of NSC Partners and Kids Math apps. This post goes into detail on how the app was conceived and created, which can be an extremely valuable perspective for those entering the app marketplace. Thanks Krishna for stepping up to share your story, and for keeping Clean Energy Hawaii FREE through Monday, April 25th, for teachers who were on break last week!
Our inspiration to build the Clean Energy Hawaii STEM app started at the 2010 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) during an education and medical reception hosted by Apple. A New York Apple sales engineer said, “…we are selling many iPads to New York schools, you have the Kids Math Fun apps, do you have any STEM apps? Schools are looking for curriculum quality apps…they don’t want games.”
We knew the Maui Economic Development Board (MEDB) Women in Technology(WIT) Project in Hawaii had developed and fielded a well respected middle and high school STEM curriculum on clean energy. We met and suggested a partnership. Let’s take your clean energy curriculum and teaching knowledge, combine it with our app development experience to create the first Clean Energy Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) app. We wanted an app that would respect the culture of Hawaii; be a great resource to teachers, parents, and students; encourage the scientific discovery processes, and be a technology platform for future STEM applications. Why now? Because, according to Apple, there was a clear developing need in the school market for quality classroom STEM applications.
We knew that development of the application would require top notch graphics and a special type of graphic artist, an artist who would relate to the project, connect with the team, and understand both the passion and mission of WIT. We asked for help from Moms with Apps co-founder, Lynette Mattke. Lynette’s PicPocket Books and NSC Partners connected a few years ago through Twitter, and have successfully partnered to cross-market ever since. Lynette told us that Amber Haynes, Founder of RedLovesGreen, specialized in doing work for organizations focused on social or environmental responsibility. Amber and the entire team clicked immediately. To ensure Amber could see exactly how her graphics looked in the app, we sent her Ad Hoc builds to see what was working and what needed improvement. This level of interaction and partnering served the team well, improving both quality and cycle time.
Many of our initial ideas were scrapped after being mocked-up and tested. More
iterations than we can remember were made of the layouts, graphics, icons, information flow, and activities. Our goal was to complete the project in three months, but it took five. In the end we believed what mattered most was quality. Allowing adequate time for creativity, and listening to other points of view, made the app stronger and more versatile for many classroom situations.
The app is designed as a platform, so if other states or countries want to feature their clean energy projects or any other type of map based information, we can do that fairly easily.
The team, which never met face to face, was located in four time zones: Maui, Seattle, Atlanta, and India. We held weekly one hour meetings using Go To Meeting and communicated by primarily by email and Skype. In the beginning, we realized that there would be many changes to the text and photos that appeared in the app. So we asked, how can we make it easy to change the content and not create disruptions to the code? We opted to use a structured excel spreadsheet and built a sophisticated macro tool to automatically convert the spreadsheet content into a property list (plist). This allowed the WIT team to change the text, photos, and videos many, many times without having an impact on the code. Today, this tool and process, developed by Jagmeet Chawla, an NSC Partner and Founder, allows us to add new energy sites, delete decommissioned ones, and update all the energy facts without any changes to the application code. We are reusing this tool and process for several medical applications that are in development.
We assumed that gathering the content, locating all the clean energy sites in Hawaii, adding photos, and entering energy use metrics would be easy. Much to everyone’s surprise the data and many of the metrics were not in one place; the information had to be painfully and meticulously gathered, vetted, and organized. Also, many of the photos we wanted to use of the various clean energy sites turned out to be fine for the classroom, but were not licensed for use in a commercial application. As such, several of us enjoyed hiking for hours through moderately rough terrain to solar, wind and hydroelectric sites across the islands to take video and photos for the app. This allowed us to personally appreciate the scale and impact of some of these clean energy projects.
Everyone you meet has a great idea for an app these days, but unfortunately most apps fall short of sales expectations. We occasionally forget that customers don’t automatically find great products. Sometimes, great products get lost and never see their full market potential. We have participated in Moms with Apps since the beginning primarily to help us focus on marketing and to learn from the dedicated and creative network of global developers. Last year during the WWDC, we had the pleasure of meeting the Moms with Apps co-founder Lorraine Akemann. What Lorraine has been able to do to help indie developers connect and market their apps is truly amazing. Without her leadership driving the Moms with Apps Forum, App Friday’s, Blog, Facebook posts, Tweets, the MWA app, and countless other efforts, marketing would be much more difficult and many of the great family friendly apps would not enjoy success. So, to Lorraine and Lynette we want to say thank you!
Finally, we want to share some practical lessons since we started our company in 2008: Its OK to ask for help. Partnering reduces risk and provides leverage. Encouraging other points view often results in nuggets of gold. Failing (occasionally) is healthy and builds experience. Allowing adequate time for creativity is critical for innovation. Flexibility and adaptability is a competitive advantage.
