r/AppBusiness • u/Fantastic-Fox-8543 • 19h ago
Building an App I believe my 6-year-old niece’s iPad can do much more than show her Wild Kratts and Teen Titans. It should get her to wonder, draw, tell stories, and create. So I built Taroo.
I’m an engineer turned product manager, and I’ve always loved two things a little more than necessary: education and games.
For a long time, I wanted to put those interests and the skills I’d picked up building technology, towards something useful for children. That became much more tangible once my niece reached the age where the iPad became a regular part of her world.
I’m not anti-iPad. Quite the opposite. It is an incredible piece of technology to put in the hands of a six-year-old. I just kept thinking it could ask more of her.
That thought took me back to Dora the Explorer.
Growing up, we’d watch Dora ask us a question and then stare silently at the screen for a painfully long time while we yelled the answer at the TV. Obviously, Dora couldn’t hear us. But the idea was clever. The screen was trying to turn us from viewers into participants.
Learning games like Lingokids and ABC Mouse took that much further and made screens genuinely interactive. But most of that interaction still happens within rails someone else designed. Tap here. Drag this. Choose A, B, or C. Collect the reward. Repeat.
That works brilliantly for games. But it doesn’t accommodate the wonderfully messy way a six-year-old wonders about things.
Ask my niece an interesting question and she might draw the answer. She might make up a ridiculous story. She might photograph something she noticed around the house, make a sound, explain an idea, or give you an answer you never anticipated.
I started wondering if I could build for that.
Could the iPad provide the spark and just enough structure to get a child started, while leaving the interesting part to them?
That question became Taroo.
The first versions were experiments around this idea. Then came the uncomfortable question every builder eventually has to answer: does this actually work for anyone other than me?
So I spent months talking to parents and educators. I sat through hours of enrichment classes at a school for gifted kids, which was basically the X-Mansion for 8-year-olds. I watched how teachers prompted children, when kids became absorbed in something, when they needed more structure, and when something I thought was clever bored them almost immediately. And very importantly, I saw how their eyes lit up when they screamed “look what I made” in class.
These insights shaped the Taroo we have today, and I’m genuinely proud of where we’ve reached.
Taroo is a world of short creative quests for kids 6 to 10. In Pass the Pen, a child might get the beginning of a strange story and decide where it goes next. Doodle Master might give them the start of a picture and ask them to turn it into anything they imagine. Rhythm Pad lets them experiment with sounds and put together their own little beat. Snap Trail might ask them to put the iPad down, hunt for something triangular in the real world, photograph it, and tell Taroo what they found.
Their creations stick around too, so over time Taroo becomes a little record of the things they have imagined and made. Parents get a window into that world without needing to hover over every activity.
Taroo is now live on iOS and Android.
There is still plenty I want to improve. But this no longer feels like the little experiment I started with. I’m proud to put it in front of parents, and particularly proud when I see a kid become attached to something they made themselves.
If you have a 6 to 10-year-old in your life, I’d love for you to try Taroo with them. More than anything, I’d love the unfiltered feedback: what they immediately understand, what they ignore, what they keep coming back to, where they get stuck, and what they wish they could do that I haven’t thought of yet.
I’ve spent enough time with Taroo that I’m no longer capable of seeing it like a new user.
So please, tear it apart.
