OCTAR

OCTAR is a fun, educational app for kids, used under parental guidance. It lets children explore and learn through interactive coloring and augmented reality.

Coloring is one of the first creative activities children take to, but a finished page stays flat. Once the colouring is done, there’s nothing more to discover or learn from it. OCTAR keeps the hands-on part in the child’s hands, on paper or a tablet, and adds what a page can’t: a 3D model of what the child just coloured, facts about it, and a quiz to check what they learned.

Kids download black-and-white educational drawings from the OCTAR website: animals, numbers, letters, vehicles and more. They can print them and colour by hand, or colour them digitally on a tablet.

Then they scan their coloured drawing with the app, and it turns the 2D page into a vibrant 3D model on screen. Each object comes with educational facts, and interactive quizzes let children test what they’ve learned in a playful way.

Because the loop starts away from the phone, the app walks through it before the first session. Kids skip long instructions, so the tutorial is four short steps, each with an illustration and a single line of text, followed by a guide to the category library and the camera icons.

To customise content, the app needed to know each child: what they’re interested in, and what they need to improve. So onboarding asks two short sets of questions. Parents describe their child’s learning environment, their goals and how involved they want to be. Then the child answers their own: favourite colour, animals or robots, coloring or puzzles.

Children’s patience runs out fast, so each set offers a skip option after four to six questions, and no one gets bored or stuck. Asking parents first also brings them into the experience from the start, which matters because young children learn more with an adult alongside. A note before the kids’ questions asks parents to let children answer for themselves, explaining a question if needed rather than answering for them.

The camera is where the drawing comes alive, so its controls are big, colourful icons rather than text: switch between the child’s colours and a “magic world”, view facts about each item, take a photo or record a video of the creation, share it, and play music. An on-screen hint shows how to pinch to zoom.

Children recognise familiar icons long before they read comfortably, so every tool is a picture first, with labels saved for the tutorial that explains them.

OCTAR is designed for interaction with the physical environment, so a consent screen asks that children use it under parental supervision, mindful of any hazards around them. Accounts sign in with an email and password, and a “Join with code” option offers a second way in.

Every screen exists in English and in Arabic, with the Arabic layouts mirrored right to left.