The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to address a significant need: aiding parents as they help their children learn to read. In particular, our goal is to develop software that will enable a parent and their child, who are not co-located, to reap the benefits that academic research say accrue from reading together as if they were sitting together on the family couch. There are a myriad of challenges arising from the nature of mobile devices and networks that support mobile devices that will need to be addressed. While collaborative functionality is available on desktops and laptops, it is not available on mobile devices due to these challenges. Ruckus proposed Read Together While Apart Technology (RTWA) that should enable the parent and child to read the same award winning Ruckus eBook together in real-time, enable the parent and child to play interactive games embedded in the eBook together, and speak together through their mobile devices, i.e., talk without the hassle and expense of a long distance phone call.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project address a key 21st activity: supporting individuals as they engage in collaboration activities while each is using a mobile device. There is clear evidence that individuals working together as a team can solve problems that individuals acting alone cannot. Towards helping individuals use their mobile devices to work together, each using their own copy of a specific app, Ruckus proposed Read Together While Apart Technology (RTWA), while initially targeting a parent and child reading/talking/playing interactive games in an eBook while not co-located, can be used, after some modification, to "collaborify" virtually any mobile app thus enabling multiple concurrent users to create, edit, update, etc. the same file. Ruckus will make the RTWA technology available as an API, a self-contained software package, so that third-party developers can include it in their applications to enable collaboration with non co-located users.
Academic research confirms the observation that when a parent/guardian and a child sit together and read a book, besides being enjoyable, that experience can be a positive learning experience for the child. The challenge, then, is to support a parent/guardian reading with a child when the parent is not co-located with the child. Under funding from the NSF SBIR program, Ruckus Media Group has developed the Read Together While Apart Technology that enables, for example, a parent/guardian in a hotel room on a business trip in Singapore, and a child, in his or her bed in the family home in Iowa, each using their own mobile device, to "read the same" interactive eBook together, e.g., they can view the same pages at the same time of the eBook, as well as engage together with the same learning activities (e.g., puzzles, games) embedded in the eBook. Most importantly, they can talk to each other through the same mobile device without the need to bear the inconvenience (if not downright struggle for the child) or expense of a long distance phone call. The real-time synchronous collaboration afforded by the Read Together While Apart Technology enables a parent/guardian and their child, who are not co-located, to reap the benefits of reading together as if they were sitting together, in their home, on the family couch. As the Ruckus eBooks contain puzzles and games, in addition to text, pictures, and video, the Read Together While Apart Technology enables a parent/guardian and child to play the games and do the puzzles either cooperatively, working together to get a better score or complete the puzzle faster, or competitively, to play against each -- laughing and talking, naturally, even when the parent and child are apart (i.e., not co-located). Indeed, the preliminary tests of the Read Together While Apart Technology do appear to give parents/guardians and their children the positive experiences of being physically together while reading, doing puzzles and playing games in the Ruckus eBooks.
