SBIR Phase I: Employing the Read Together While Apart Technology to Create Engaging and Educationally Effective Interactive Children's eBooks

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.