LeVar Burton Creating Reading Rainbow iPad App

Reading Rainbow is getting a serious upgrade.

LeVar Burton, a children’s literacy advocate and a former star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plans to launch an educational iPad app that lets children explore topics of interest in a multimedia-rich environment.

RRkidz, Burton’s for-profit venture is creating the app, which will feature voice-over-enhanced children’s books, videos of Burton at real-life places (like NASA), and, of course, games.  The app will launch as a monthly subscription model, so kids can explore unlimited titles as their interests expand.

RRkidz mission: get children reading

Burton tells Fast Company he’s on a mission to “get kids hooked on books,” and says his company is “going to where kids are today; those devices that they love to spend time on.”

“The educational system is just not getting it done,” says Burton. “If we’re going to reclaim our place in the world, in terms of how we educate our children and how we prepare them for the future: it’s going to get done through a private-public partnership.”

Why this app?

What makes this app any different from the many other educational tools available to kids today? Burton says it is his years of experience delivering instruction through television.

“I’m the curator,” he says. “I chose the voices, I put together the team; this is the value of 25-plus years of experience that I bring to this venture.”

Burton mentions that this has given him a unique insight into what engages the mind of a child, citing Reading Rainbow, a show he hosted and helped produce. Reading Rainbow originally began as a PBS summer series to get kids interested in occupying their free time with books for the three months between school years.

Interactive books

The first RRKidz product will be a multimedia-enhanced reading ecosystem on the iPad. Stories are given a digital upgrade with voice-overs, light animation, and games. Incorporated into the digital library, which launches with 300 books, is a set of games and professionally produced videos.

RRKidz also plans some “disruptive” technology, which Burton says will allow him to enhance a PDF book with voice-over, light animation, and games “in a matter of hours.” The technology is a “streamlined” process that will allow an individual worker to digitally enhance enough content to grow the library at 35 books in the first months after launch.

For more information read the full article at Fast Company.