Explore Shakespeare App
It’s the time of year where your children are stressing out over exams, which means, as a parent, you do a lot of stressing yourself. They are studying the literature classics from Shakespeare, but with the vocabulary something that they aren’t familiar with, it’s proving hard for them to study this piece of work. You try your best to help them along and give them the tips and tricks you learned as a child, but as children do, they don’t take much notice. So why not try Cambridge University’s latest app,‘Explore Shakespeare,’ that will help your children get on the right track of understanding Shakespeare’s plays.
Cambridge University press have teamed up with app developer Agant to introduce a new way of learning about Shakespeare, and his work, to bring back the excitement into revision. The app provides his most famous works of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the ‘Explore Shakespeare’ series.
The app has an impressive variety of features, which includes a section titled ‘Unique Circles,’ which shows you how the characters are related in a fantastic way for your children to find it easier to memorise.The app provides a built-in theme graph to see the flow of the plays and circles the shows and the relationships between the characters, with this being easy to understand with the illuminating visuals, it also shows who's on stage in each scene to help you become familiar with the characters.
If you want to get to know a character a little more, it provides you with ‘Word Clouds’ that let you explore the characters and their favourite words and how they are used. A glittering cast of well-known Shakespearean actors perform in audio versions of the plays, including Romeo and Juliet’s Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen, this app provides a twist into the stereotypical style of reading, which will allow for your child to experience and feel the story.
Genevra Champion, Marketing Manager for International Education at Cambridge University Press said: “The apps will be perfect for giving tired students a boost…and put the fun back into learning…”
She added: “The apps are great fun used alone and in groups and are a wonderful way to encourage teenagers to collaborate and benefit from learning together.”
Cambridge University wanted to test the water with the app with students from Stephen Perse Foundation’s senior school in Cambridge and invited twenty students, three teachers and one parent to see what the app had to offer.
A parent, Kelly Allnutt, said of the app: “The graphics are beautiful and I knew my daughter would be attracted to them. Anything that helps her to enjoy her studying more is worthwhile I think.”
She added: “On the whole I thought the app was very engaging and useful…I feel it is a little overpriced for what it is, although if it helps my child to enjoy her studies I would be happy to buy it. More images, video and audio would increase its value.”
A year nine student from Stephen Perse Foundation’s senior school in Cambridge thought the app was easy to use. “The app was set out in a really easy-to-read way, which made it easier to get a feel for the play more quickly… it was easy to navigate around the app-after I got the hand of it, it was simple to use but it did take some time to work it out.”
Another student from the Stephen Perse Foundation’s senior school in Cambridge added: “I really liked looking at the word clouds of the app because it was an eye-catching way to look at the semantic patterns in the play, and I liked being able to see them grouped together, the way that they were arranged by size, and the fact that I could change whether I was looking at the overall patterns, or just those of a specific character or scene.
The iPad apps are available worldwide on Apple’s App Store pricing at £9.99 each.
Tagged in Parenting