SmartStudy brings mobile GCSE study applications to BlackBerry smartphones firstSmartStudy is a British start-up developing mobile study aids for GCSE students. It has chosen BlackBerry® smartphones as its primary delivery platform.

Key Benefits

• High market penetration among target audience

• BBM connectivity integrated into app

• Rapid app development

• Seamless content updates

The Challenge

Every year, 1.1 million 16-year-old English secondary school students sit General Certificate of

Secondary Education (GCSE) exams. Four exam boards provide GCSEs in England. The exam boards

set out the topics that are covered in the course specification. They also write the exam questions;

check the students’ coursework and controlled assessments; and mark all the exam papers. Schools

choose a specification from one of the boards for each exam subject.

While each exam board’s specification covers similar subject matter, the terminology, diagrams and

examples vary from one board to the next. To improve their chances of success, therefore, it is important

that students use revision tools tailored to the specification that their school has chosen for the subject.

In addition, students need to learn terms and definitions by heart, especially in maths and sciences.

Finally, revising for GCSEs alone at home can be daunting for students, who are used to working in groups

at school and interacting with their peers on social networks using their smartphones. Ideally, to help

students in this task, there would be a mobile app that let students learn exam terminology on their

smartphones and study together using social networking.

BlackBerry Customer Success Application Developer – Education

The Solution

This is the idea behind the Wordbook applications being developed by SmartStudy. The content-rich

apps will allow students to look up and revise vocabulary, diagrams and photos for their exams on

internet-enabled devices. They will be able to purchase Wordbooks for the exam board specification

they are studying. The first Wordbooks are being developed for science GCSEs, under the supervision

of Ann Fullick, an internationally renowned author of GCSE and A-level science textbooks. The application

is being developed by Blueberry Consultants.

When it came to picking the mobile platform, SmartStudy decided to go with the BlackBerry® platform

for two important reasons. First, market research showed that BlackBerry® smartphones were incredibly

popular among their target audience. “BlackBerry is massive among teenagers because of BlackBerry

Messenger,” says Philip Reynolds, co-founder of SmartStudy. “It’s a big slice of the market that we’re

after.” Second, by integrating BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) functionality directly into the applications,

SmartStudy hopes to make revision more compelling. Wordbooks will be BBM-connected apps, which

means that students will be able to test themselves against their peers in real time.

“Imagine you’ve got a group of kids studying physics. They can organise study sessions via BBM and

compare scores and challenge each other to friendly games directly from the Wordbook application. They

can check progress via leader boards and encourage each other to keep studying. That’s something that

can make learning really interesting,” says Martin Green, managing director of Blueberry Consultants.

The Benefits

For SmartStudy, the decision to go with the BlackBerry platform provided an unforeseen advantage:

speed of development. As Green explains: “BlackBerry WebWorks makes it much, much easier to

develop a BBM-connected application”. “If we were doing this on another mobile platform we could

achieve the same results, but we would have to do quite a lot more work; whereas doing it on WebWorks

is very, very easy.” BlackBerry WebWorks is an open source Software Developers Kit (SDK) for developing

HTML 5 apps with native capabilities. It comes with BlackBerry APIs that let developers integrate

BlackBerry-specific features like BBM directly into the application.

BlackBerry smartphones provide a user experience that lets the Wordbook material shine. “The quality

of the content and how well it matches the specification is crucial, as is how it fits the way the students

do homework and revise for their exams,” says Fullick. “Wordbook apps cover both sides of the equation.”

In focus groups and user testing, Wordbooks for BlackBerry get consistently high marks from students,

who applaud the application’s ease of use and relevance to the way they study. In addition, the BlackBerry

platform makes updating the content of the Wordbooks app seamless

and provides detailed feedback on user behaviour, which will help

SmartStudy adapt the content to user requirements.

From a business point of view, the integration of BBM should help

SmartStudy market the Wordbook apps by making it highly viral.

“As a brand new product on the market, it is crucial that we build critical

mass as quickly as possible,” says Reynolds. “Being BBM-connected

will help us do this because if one student with a BlackBerry starts using

Wordbook there’s a very good chance he or she will suggest to friends

that they get them too, so they can study together.”

Industry: Education

Region: UK

Company Size: Small

Solution: Wordbooks for BlackBerry BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) Connected Application

“As a brand new product on the market, it is crucial that we build critical mass as quickly as possible. Being BBM-connected will help us do this because if one student with a BlackBerry starts using Wordbook there’s a very good chance he or she will suggest to friends that they get them too, so they can study together.”Philip Reynolds co-founder SmartStudy

© 2012 Research In Motion Limited. All rights reserved. BlackBerry®, RIM®, Research In Motion® and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world. Device featured: BlackBerry® Bold™ smartphone.

blackberry.co.uk/casestudies