PSYC 101 Essay: A Gaming Application for Early Childhood Development

This essay, created for a PSYC 101 assignment, describes a gaming application designed for two-year-old children. The app aims to facilitate cognitive and language development, preparing children for school through interactive word puzzles and story-building adventures. The essay identifies the target audience and discusses key developmental markers for this age group, supported by citations from the course textbook and scholarly articles. The application is designed to be safe and engaging, utilizing colors and cartoons to maintain children's interest while promoting learning. The essay also references a Bible verse to emphasize the app's role in supporting parents during early childhood development.

Running head: GAMING APPLICATION FOR CHILDREN
GAMING APPLICATION FOR CHILDREN
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1GAMING APPLICATION FOR CHILDREN
In today’s age of information and technology, parents have to face new challenges in
parenting their children. It has become difficult to keep the children away from using phones.
Therefore, it becomes important that the children use such applications that induce their
developmental growth in an effective manner. The aim of this paper is to describe one such
gaming application for children of two years of age that can help facilitate children’s growth.
Children of two years reach many milestones in the categories of social, cognitive,
emotional, physical, and language development (Banich & Compton, 2018). They are able to
imitate others, show signs of motor skills by starting to learn to walk on their own and even
include others in their play, which in early stages was mostly absent. However, another
important developmental aspect of children of two years of age is their development in language
and communication (Lourenço, 2016). Two-year-old children are able to form sentences using
more than two words; they are able to follow simple instructions, they can point at things or
pictures when they are named, they can repeat conversations and can even identify the names of
familiar people and certain body parts (Lesh & Harel, 2014). Children are exposed to a lot of
media in this age and it is important that they be guided to the usage of proper applications that
can make the lives of the parents easier and benefit the children.
One application that can enhance the above mentioned developmental stages of children
are the learning gaming apps. My app is a gaming app that can help children learn and have fun
at the same time. The purpose of the app is to prepare the children for school by improving upon
their language and cognitive skills. The application will have features such as word puzzles
where children can arrange the letters to form simple words like cats, dogs and so on. The game
will also have the feature where the children will be able to form stories through a series of
interactive adventures. The usage of colours and cartoons in the game will help the children

2GAMING APPLICATION FOR CHILDREN
remain engaged with the app however, in a way that assures the parents of their children safety.
Such educational apps are perfect for two-year-olds as that can help them improve their language
skills. The bible verse Psalm 34:4 – “I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me
from all my fears” (Christian, 2019), fits perfectly here as this gaming app is indeed here to
rescue the parents form the tough task of parenting their two-year-olds.

3GAMING APPLICATION FOR CHILDREN
References
Banich, M. T., & Compton, R. J. (2018). Cognitive neuroscience. Cambridge University Press.
Christian, D. (2019). Bible Verses about Faith.
Lesh, R., & Harel, G. (2014). Problem solving, modeling, and local conceptual development.
In Models and Modeling Perspectives (pp. 51-84). Routledge.
Lourenço, O. M. (2016). Developmental stages, Piagetian stages in particular: A critical
review. New Ideas in Psychology, 40, 123-137.