We wanted to develop reading and digital skills among children aged 6-10 years. It is of utmost importance that the use of digital tools is not limited to the currently widely used, self-centred social media (although reading texts with understanding is necessary there too.) We have found that shorter texts help children to experience reading. As a consequence, we hope they will explore longer texts in the future. It may also help them in their learning at school, as longer texts are currently found in all reading books. The long-term goal of Cheekyheads is to provide a way for children to love reading longer, larger books, the short-term goal of the app is to improve independent reading. In addition to the above, we wanted to develop language skills and reading ability, which is a natural progression of vocabulary development. To achieve these goals, we wanted to create a comprehensive reading app that would help children to read and learn together with their parents and/or teachers.
Members of both partner organisations are personally affected by this challenge, as we are surrounded by children aged 6-10 years old. We also drew from regrettable experiences and personal experiences (like "Oh, this book is too long, I won't read it!") when we started brainstorming about the project. Unfortunately, in our experience, functional illiteracy is now a feature of a large part of society that calls itself literate. We find that many people are often unable to understand even very short texts. With this app, we wanted to contribute to the eradication of functional illiteracy, which is a real and very serious problem. We wanted to prevent it (because we believe that prevention is the most effective tool) with the age group that is learning to read. Our plan was to create a nice, cute mobile phone application with interactive features. We wanted to give a virtual reading book in the hands of children aged 6-10, to develop both reading and digital skills.