Of all the applications we were able to see at SXSWEdu, Wandoo Planet was easily our favorite. Wandoo Planet is a project of Evanced Games – an Indianapolis educational game development company.¹ Wandoo Planet takes an incredibly unique approach to get children reading more.

Wandoo Plant is built on the premise that if children are actively learning about and doing the thing that they love, they will transcend their reading levels. With that idea as the foundation, Wandoo Planet seeks to expose children to, and help them uncover more of the things that they enjoy. Wandoo Planet is called a, “kid-powered interest genome project.”² What exactly does that mean? Evanced Games likens Wandoo Planet to a sort of Pandora for children:

Driven by an “adaptive learning system” algorithm, Wandoo Planet is a little like Pandora or Netflix—that’s why we call it the world’s first kid-powered interest genome project.³

Essentially, what that means is that Wandoo Planet is a content discovery platform for Children. When starting the application, users are prompted to select from a large amount of interests – with a thumbs up, thumbs down, or a heart for one of three favorite topics. Once the topics are set, the application then builds an interest tree where users can dig into their favorite topics for book, movie, and other recommendations. Then, as these recommendations are completed, user can rate how much they enjoyed each.

We had a chance to speak with Lindsey Hill – on of the Co-Founders of Wandoo Planet – at the SXSWEdu expo. Whe told us a little bit more about Wandoo Planet and what the future holds for the company: