How we develop Apps

Our key objectives are to only develop applications which add significant value to the teaching and learning process and which also do not duplicate resources already existing in the general market. 

As part of this approach our strategy has been to ensure that our products were/are available on as many platforms used in education as possible. In the early days this meant writing the same programs for BBC and RM 380Z (for anybody who remembers that far back) and developing our software using TurboPascal to make it as compatible as possible. Today this approach means we develop for all the major platforms - Apple, Windows, IOS and Android. We don't cover every variation but you can use our programs on phones, tablets and computers of almost every kind.

We also want our products to be as similar as possible between the various platforms, particularly so that any teacher or centrally produced learning guides work in any classroom and also when students try the same thing on their phones. As a result we decided early on that we needed toolsets that made the standardisation across platforms easy to achieve and also meant that updates and bugfixes were quick and equivalent across platforms. Initially we tried to write apps in the relevant development architecture for each platform but found quickly that this resulted in apps that looked different, acted differently and were difficult to maintain as a family. We moved on to investigate and choose a cross platform architecture where we could develop once and publish to each platform from a common code source.

We currently develop and publish with CoronaLabs toolkit. There are limitations, it is designed for rapid game development but it suits us and does not add (at all) to the costs we have. Overall we strongly recommend CoronaLabs not only for ourselves but also as a teaching medium for schools and colleges.