Follow the chick to the ice cream shop, the bakery and the zoo. Tap things to hear their names, order an ice cream, then run the shop yourself. For young children learning Dutch, English or Japanese, with everything explained in their own language.
Coming soon to:
The town looks like where the language is spoken, so a word comes with a place to remember it in.
Each place in town is a little world to poke at. Every visit is a bit different: a flavour sells out, it's the shopkeeper's birthday, it starts to rain.
The cone, the spoon, the dog under the counter. Each one says its name.
Pick a reply, hear it, then say it out loud. Ask for a dog instead? You'll get a funny answer.
A customer asks for mango in a cup. Listen, build it, hand it over: "Alsjeblieft!"
Word pairs, find-it and letter games, plus a short practice each day that brings back the words that are due.
Piyoka isn't flashcards with a cartoon on top. Each part of it follows something researchers have found about how young children learn and remember words.
In a study of 3-year-olds, children who heard the same story three times learned and kept new words better than children who heard three different stories with the same words.
Horst, Parsons & Bryan (2011), Frontiers in Psychology
Two-year-olds said new words better when they met them across several days than all at once. Spacing helped 3-year-olds remember, too.
Childers & Tomasello (2002), Developmental Psychology; Vlach, Sandhofer & Kornell (2008), Cognition
Preschoolers remembered new names far better when they practised recalling them than when they just saw them again. In 4 and 5-year-olds, recalling new words helped them remember both the sound and the meaning.
Fritz, Morris, Nolan & Singleton (2007), Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; Leonard & Deevy (2020), JSLHR
In studies of 5-year-olds, children remembered the names of pictures better when they said them aloud than when they only looked or listened.
Icht & Mama (2015), Journal of Child Language
In a study of Spanish-speaking preschoolers learning English, children learned more English words when new words were also explained in Spanish.
Lugo-Neris, Jackson & Goldstein (2010), LSHSS
A review of 38 experiments found that teaching letter sounds step by step helps children learn to read, most of all in kindergarten and first grade.
Ehri, Nunes, Stahl & Willows (2001), Review of Educational Research
Researchers who looked at what children learn from apps came up with four questions to ask. We designed Piyoka around them.
Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015), Psychological Science in the Public Interest
These studies are about how children learn in general. Most were small lab studies, and none of them tested Piyoka itself. We use them as a guide to how we build it.
Each language works both as your home language and as the one to learn. Several children can share a device, and each can learn more than one language.
Piyoka is coming soon to iPad, iPhone, Android and the web.
Back to the top β