The Idea

When Lori Jackson and Steve Peck, founders of The Connections Model, sought to create an app to help children on the autism spectrum manage their behavior in class, they turned to Rocket Farm Studios.

“We’ve spent over 15 years working with kids on the spectrum who have major disabilities,” says Jackson. “These children often struggle to understand and express their emotions, which leads to frustration, anger, or withdrawal from the classroom. As a result, they miss out on 50 to 70 percent of class time.”

Peck initially designed a prototype for KidConnect, an app aimed at helping both educators and students identify emotions and express them in healthier ways. Early testing of the prototype produced incredible results—students using the app were able to re-engage with class activities without having to leave the room.

“These kids learn to work through their emotions and regain focus without needing to step away,” explains Jackson. “They start to understand their feelings, express them constructively, and spend 75 to 80 percent of the time in class—an incredible improvement.”

Our Strategic Approach

The challenge was to collaborate with 5 different companies to create an app, accounting for sheet music, digital rights, and a store.

While determining how to translate a sheet music store and playback to the iPad, we faced several engineering challenges.

The Notestar app integrated Yamaha’s eCommerce engine with Noteflight’s Publishing Server, as well as the Digital Rights Management servers for Hal Leonard and MusicSales.

Rocket Farm had to utilize the signal processing capabilities of the iPad to handle pitch correction and tempo changes on the iPad in real-time, so users could speed up or slow down playback to match their own speed.

Finally, there was the graphics processing — the display of music scores with advanced animation of page-turning, all tightly synchronized with the playback of one or more audio tracks.

Design

The Experience

UI Design

Driven by a desire to bring KidConnect to educators, Jackson and Peck collaborated with Rocket Farm Studios to create a fully functional app. In addition to a tool for students, the app grew to include features specifically for administrators and educators.

To enhance ease of use, the app was designed to run in portrait mode for educators and landscape mode for children. A PIN protection feature was added to prevent children from bypassing the app's structure.

KidConnect also allows for extensive customization to cater to the diverse needs of students. For instance, the app can record video of students as they use it, but this feature can be turned off for children who are uncomfortable seeing themselves on camera. Educators can further personalize the app's functionality to suit individual student needs.

The app captures a wide range of data during each session, including the time of the incident, the class, and the outcome of the child’s interaction with the program. This data not only helps improve the app experience but also provides valuable insights into how children with autism manage their emotions in real-world situations.

Rocket Farm provided a thoughtful and innovative process that got us through a lot of design challenges in a short time. Their work on NoteStar demonstrates the ability to create products that are smooth running, innovative, and well designed.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Development

Making it work

Rocket Farm Studios worked closely with Jackson and Peck to bring KidConnect to life. The app was designed to provide a tailored user experience for both students and educators, ensuring that it was intuitive, customizable, and easy to navigate. The collaboration resulted in an app that empowers children to understand their emotions while offering educators the tools to track and guide behavior effectively.

The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. The app had to support page-turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode.

There were also other unique interaction challenges: setting loop points to practice a section repeatedly, adding annotations to the score, and selecting different pitches. With all these , Rocket Farm undertook separate design phases.

The first was focused on the eCommerce store and the other on the playback experience. We actively tested user interactions as they were implemented. This approach was critical as these were ground-breaking features that required more than great paper designs, but the iterative incorporation of real user feedback to get it right.

Rocket Farm Studios were extremely agile in how they presented and iterated on design – whether for the HTML5 store portion or the much more expressive set of interactions incorporated into the playback aspect of the app.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Technology Used