How to Judge a Learning App for a Four-Year-Old: Seven Tests

"Educational" is a category in an app store. It is not a claim anyone verifies. A game where a cartoon animal shouts encouragement while a child taps randomly is filed in exactly the same place as a carefully sequenced phonics programme.

Here are seven tests. Together they take about five minutes, and you run them on the app, not on your child.

1. Can a child who cannot read use it alone?

Open it and try to use it without reading a single word. Can you tell what to do? Is there a spoken instruction, or an obvious visual one?

An app for four-year-olds with written menus, a written settings screen and written feedback has been designed by someone who forgot who was holding the device. It will require a parent for every step, which is fine if that is the plan and useless otherwise.

2. What happens on a wrong answer?

Give a wrong answer. Three possible outcomes:

• A red buzzer and a lost life. Bad. At four, that teaches that trying is risky.
• Nothing: it just moves on. Also bad. The mistake is the teachable moment and it has been thrown away.
• A gentle retry, then a hint, then the answer with a reason. Good. This is what a decent human teacher does.

Best of all is an app that says why: "the other three are red." A child who hears the reason has learned something; a child who hears a chime has learned that chimes are nice.

3. Is there a natural place to stop?

Play for two minutes and look for the end. Does an activity finish? Is there a moment that says "done"?

Endless scrolls, autoplaying next levels and streak counters exist to extend sessions. An app that is confident in what it teaches is happy for a child to finish in four minutes. An app that needs thirty minutes a day is optimising for something that is not your child's learning.

4. What does it do with attention when the child stops?

Close the app. Does it send a notification an hour later? Does it have a character who is "sad" that you left? Does it have a streak that will "break"?

These are retention mechanics designed for adults and applied to four-year-olds, who have no defences against them at all. A daily streak on a child's learning app is a manipulation, not a motivation.

5. Ads and purchases

Any advertising in an app aimed at pre-readers is a problem, because a four-year-old cannot distinguish an ad from content and cannot evaluate a purchase prompt. A child who taps everything on screen will tap the ad.

Check specifically: are there ads between activities? Does a locked item sit next to an unlocked one in a way a child will tap? Is a purchase ever more than one tap away from a child's finger?

6. Is the content actually correct?

This catches more apps than people expect, especially in the earliest content. Look at:

• The lowercase "a" and "g". Are they the single-storey handwriting forms schools teach, or the two-storey printing forms fonts supply? Most apps get this wrong, the detail is in this article.
• Letter sounds. Does it say /m/ or "muh"? The added vowel makes blending much harder. See letter names or letter sounds.
• Shapes. Is every triangle equilateral and sitting on its base? A child who only sees those often rejects a long thin triangle as not one.
• Counting. Does it ask "how many?" about real groups of things, or only show numerals in isolation?

7. Does it point off the screen?

The best test of all, and the rarest quality.

Young children frequently do not transfer what they learn in an app to the real world, a documented effect covered in what the research says about screens under six. An app that ignores this is only teaching the app.

So: does it suggest anything to do off screen? Does it print? Does it connect a shape to a real object, a number to real things, a letter to a pencil? An app that actively sends your child away from it has understood what it is for.

The five-minute version

1. Use it without reading. Could you?
2. Get one wrong. What happened?
3. Find the end of an activity. Is there one?
4. Close it. Does it chase you?
5. Look for ads and purchase buttons at a child's fingertip.
6. Check the "a", the "g" and a letter sound.
7. Ask: what does this want my child to do when the screen is off?

We built the QuizByt Kindergarten section against this list: no ads, no purchases reachable by a child, no timers, no streaks, no autoplay, a read-aloud voice that is off until someone turns it on, letters drawn in the forms schools teach, and a printable worksheet for every single activity, because the intended end of a session is a child at a table with a pencil.

Judge it by the seven tests. That is what they are for.