Make your love for cats a learning experience
Some would say that the internet is seemingly made entirely up of cute images of cats and dogs…and the content from Catmoji and Icanhascheezburger can attest to that. What if browsing all these adorable animals could become productive by teaching you Spanish?
CatAcademy is the newest project out from Memrise, a company dedicated to making learning more fun and social,and reimagines the flashcard experience by offering cat memes as the context to the learning material.
The premise behind CatAcademy is to strengthen learning by associating all the new information with the pleasurable experiences of silly cats on the internet. CatAcademy also uses Memrise’s proprietary learning algorithm to review words right before they’re forgotten to maximize learning retention.
In a statement to Forbes, Memrise CEO Ed Cooke said: “We set out to harness the power of meme-like imagery. We’re focusing on conversation, not translation…It’s designed to be perfectly addictive, taking the silliest things in the world and applying an effective learning process.”
Cat enthusiasts can check out CatAcademy on iOS now for 99 cents and as of now, only Cat Spanish is available with more coming in the future.
Nice article!
How does this actually apply to gamification? Are we engaging people via cat images and heading up the rungs of the average kitty condo (like a 3-D leaderboard)?
Funny you should ask, Christopher. The game tries to create associations between certain cat memes and Spanish phrases, e.g. a pleading-eye kitty for “por favor”, and makes dialogues in the exercises cat-and-their-human-oriented. I’ve only cleared Level 2 so far, will see how engaging this technique is 🙂
;-D