Disney Wants To Teach Your Kids With Mickey Mouse And iPads

As much as The Walt Disney Company loves to create magical experiences for us through its cartoons and theme parks, the Company also has a soft spot for creating much more than that to benefit the greater good. Some of that greater good lies in the form of learning and yesterday, the entertainment giant took the concept of learning and combined it with what they know best to create a magical learning experience for kids.

Disney’s Imagicademy is the first ever digital learning initiative that aims to teach kids (specifically 3 to 5 year olds) basic subjects using their unparalleled lineup of characters and worlds. They’ll use a suite of new mobile apps as the platform for teaching, as well as interactive printed materials and smart toys to be launched at a later date. All together, Disney hopes that they can fill a need in creating a better learning app for today’s kids. According to Andrew Sugarman, executive vice president of Disney Worldwide Publishing, they have done just that with “…quality, attention to detail, and of course, magic.”

Andrew and his team were on hand to officially announcing the initiative at a press event in New York yesterday, who also gave demos of the app suite which will ultimately include 30 apps that will cover subjects like math, science, social skills, and creativity. There will also be an companion app for parents that’ll allow them to interact with your kid as they use their own app. These apps will teach these subjects through different games designed by many education experts, according to Disney. The games will include your favorite Disney characters and environments that will all give a new approach on how to learn at a young age.

Disney will launch the first Imagicademy app on December 11 this year with a gradual rollout, including the very cute smart toys, happening through mid-2015. The apps will be available within the Apple App Store for iPad only. The first app will be free before you have to pay at $4.99 for each game within the app or $19.99 for all five.

There was no word on if the apps will make it to Android.

This isn’t Disney’s first learning initiative, however. Disney English was created to teach Chinese kids the english language – using Disney characters. One might say that Disney is using “learning” as a means of making their marketing mark on children, but nevertheless, the outcomes have been never better according to testimonials and studies made when creating the apps. If it takes Mickey Mouse to go to space to teach basic physics or Goofy to teach you basic counting, then so be it! We suppose it was probably just meant to be…

For more information on Imagicademy, click HERE.

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What do you think of Disney’s new learning tool? Do you think Disney is marketing themselves to early to kids? Will you be buying these apps for your kids to learn? Tell us in the comments!