Thursday, 12 November 2015

Happy 1st birthday to Digital Mysteries

This week (Friday) marks the first birthday of Digital Mysteries apps for iPads! It was on the 13th of November 2014 that our very first iPad app came out. This is one of the various free ‘samples’ we have on the store now and has three full ‘mysteries’ for 7-11 year olds.

Now, we have 38 apps on the App Store; 17 for 7-11 year olds and 21 for 11-16 year olds. Topics range from Ancient Greece to computer networking (with an exciting island) to volcanic eruptions to Romeo & Juliet. We have made some of our apps FREE and others half-price to celebrate (until 24th November)!

These apps have now been downloaded in 69 different countries. We love that teachers all over the world are helping students develop key skills of collaborative learning and higher level thinking AT THE SAME TIME as they cover the topics many schools have to learn about.


If you haven’t heard of Digital Mysteries before, the full range can be viewed on our website or in the App Store on our Developer page.

In summary though, they are apps designed to be used by pairs or small groups. Most mysteries ask students one main open question then give them lots of different digestible snippets of illustrated information on the screen. They must then work together to make sense of that information, link different ideas together and discuss how they can answer that question. All the actions are recorded too, so students and teachers can go through a short Reflection Stage at the end and/or get a PDF report.


They were developed following years of research by Dr. Ahmed Kharrufa, who researches the impact technology can have on various elements of learning. If you’re interested in the papers on such topics, please go to our research section.

To celebrate our birthday, we have decided to make 6 of our apps completely free and another 6 of our most popular apps almost half-price! This price drop will last for 12 days: one for every month that Digital Mysteries have been on the App Store. We hope you enjoy using them and would love to hear from you once you’ve explored the mysteries with your students.

These apps (except Amy) are usually £1.49 UK, $1.99 US, $2.99 AU.

Apps for 7-11 year olds now half price:
Apps for 11-16 year olds now half price:
Apps for 7-11 year olds now free:
Apps for 11-16 year olds now free:

If pre-existing content isn’t your thing, we are almost ready to release a new tool ‘Thinking Kit’ which lets you create YOUR OWN mystery-like activities for iPads. If you want to hear more about this, comment ‘TK’ on our form and we’ll let you know when you can have a one month FREE trial of the Thinking Kit Creator. The apps to use these created activities on will be free.

Thanks,
Natalie

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