Kitty Clues: Teaching Kids About Cat Behavior Through Play

Inspiration

As cat shelter volunteers, we noticed that many cats were there due to owner surrender. When researching this issue, we found that approximately 25% of all cat intakes into shelters are due to owner surrender, and many of those are due to child-cat conflict. We started this project in order to help keep cats out of shelters and in homes with their families.

What it does

Our app, Kitty Clues, uses structured play to teach children about cat behavior and body language cues, cat socialization techniques, and the basics of pet ownership responsibilities.

How we built it

After extensive research on child educational materials and cat socialization techniques for children, we created the workflow of this app in Figma, a design tool for building interfaces and prototypes for websites, apps, and other digital products.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had very little experience with Figma, so we had to learn as we went, which was challenging but rewarding. Also, we both have cat experience but little child development experience, so we had to learn about making age-appropriate educational material. Additionally, there were large data gaps about why cats were surrendered to shelters by their families, so we had to make some educated guesses based on our own experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the uniqueness of this solution; in our market research, we found no other applications or products like this. With further work, we believe this could be a novel product for child learning and cat wellbeing. We are also proud of our personal accomplishments of learning to use Figma throughout our time in this project. Neither of us had used the service before so there was a learning curve, but we are proud of our final product!

What we learned

We learned a lot about app development and design, child education, and cat socialization techniques.

What's next for Kitty Clues: Teaching Kids About Cat Behavior Through Play

Our next steps would include further development of the application, including more material about cat behavior, age-tailored teaching methods, and more gamification elements. This would include consultations with child education and cat care experts to ensure accurate and age-appropriate educational material. We’d expand on our prototype with the end goal of getting it in the iOS and android app stores.

Built With

• figma