October 2, 2013

Our story of how we decided to create educational apps is shaped by our backgrounds and where we want our futures to lead us.

A bit of background to start us out.

The happy animal drawings were hand drawn by my dad, Bud Wudlick, in the mid-1990s when he was an elementary school art teacher in Minneapolis. His school was a dual language English and Spanish school and he was inspired to make some "Animales" prints with fun pen-and-ink characters integrated with the Spanish names. He gave out these prints to his students and we printed off cards on colorful cardstock at Kinkos to give to friends and family. Everyone always encouraged him to sell his artwork and really make it a business. But, he doesn't like to sell his artwork.

So, now that I have my own kids in Spanish immersion elementary school, I decided to revisit those "Animales" of my dad's and bring them into the app world. I scanned and tweaked the images, separating out the text and background embellishments, until clear characters emerged. Hopefully we can build a family of real educational apps from these "Animales" originally drawn to engage and educate children in the classroom. A few years ago, the first business plan was to make a Spanish/English Animale flash card app, and that might still happen, but now we have expanded our sights to creating a rich and thorough Math Standards set of apps for the early elementary school aged child. We are creating apps that we want our own kids to learn with!

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