“My children love it, we read from it every day” - A storybook library in our pockets

Wingzzz aims to prevent this kind of undermining of close-knit family time. This new app helps aid the development of the child’s personality, sparks their curiosity and imagination, introduces them to foreign languages, and provides parents and children with the opportunity to spend quality time together. 
We had a chat with Adrienn Újfalusi, the woman behind the app that provides a digital library of selected children’s books in Hungarian, Dutch, and English.

- What personal experience led you to create Wingzzz?
- My daughter was born seven years ago, my son three years ago. I felt, from the time they were born that even though we live in the Netherlands and we do not have many Hungarian acquaintances here, it is important that they learn their native language.

I want them to feel at home whenever they return Hungary. I knew that reading stories together is one of the most important ways to pique the interest of small children and to motivate them to develop their language skills.

Playful storytelling stimulates the use of their imagination to ’give them wings’ so to speak. Apart from this, I have very warm nostalgic feelings about projected story-book filmstrips from my own childhood. As a new mother I set out to obtain a projector and all the old slides I could remember as a youngster.  My children really enjoyed reading the magically projected stories every night, but, sadly, it wasnt long before we ran out of content. 

As a mother living abroad, finding Hungarian storybooks proved to be quite difficult. We travel to Hungary three or four times a year, and on these visits, I always raid the  bookstores, but it’s still not enough. Sometimes, when I run out of material, I translate Dutch stories to read for them. This is where the idea to make stories accessible to children in their native language, no matter where they are from. We have these services for music and films, you just get yourself a subscription and you instantly have a whole collection of content at your disposal. I felt like this solution was lacking when it comes to children’s books, especially in multiple language versions.

- You mention how imagination gives us wings: is that where the name comes from?
- Yes, to me, it’s a very important symbol. When I thought of the butterfly as a logo, I was sure that this idea had to go somewhere, it had to “take flight out of my head.” The morpho butterfly symbolizes growth and development, an unfolding that happens in each of our lives. As children, we begin as little seeds or eggs. The first 7-10 years of life are an especially sensitive and a critical period. The transformation of a toddler depends on what we “fill them up with,” the values we pass on to them. Over time they become beautiful butterflies and fly high, 

Wingzzz believes we should give kids the imagination to fly and stories are perfect for that. They decrease tension, help process problems, develop emotional intelligence, and provide examples for how to make friends and how to love one another.

- How do you choose the stories?
- We paid very close attention when choosing the stories. The three zzz’s at the end of Wingzzz on the one hand refers to falling asleep, to a state of calm and quiet. This subtly points to the fact that parents can rest easy regarding the content. On this platform, you can be sure that your children will not encounter anything that may be harmful to them, that they would find disturbing, or provide them with bad examples. Our partners are mainly publishers, but we work with authors as well. We only include the most appropriate, high-quality texts in our library.
- It is especially important for families living abroad to have children’s content available in their mother tongue and good stories are always in demand. Both Hungarians and the Dutch are open to getting to know popular stories from different cultures.

The world has gotten a lot more global and people enjoy seeing the world through one another’s eyes, especially when it comes to the world of imagination.

We are currently working on making Wingzzz available in additional languages too, in order to provide enrichment through the meeting of cultures.

- Do you emphasize classic or contemporary stories in your library?
- We want to keep a balance of content. Variety is very important. We want to have stories that fit different tastes and moods. Folktales and classic storybooks are wonderful and there are also a number of modern writers who are really in tune with the everyday lives of children and parents and take inspiration from these situations. There is room on our platform for both traditional tales and ones where the charactres are useing Skype, for instance.

- We are hearing and reading an increasing amount of discussion on the detrimental effects that the overuse of smart devices, apps and social media have on us. How do you avoid this with a digital interface?
- Digital reading interfaces complement paper-based books very well, and I trust that they will not replace physical storybooks for a very long time yet. 

However, there are situations when digital solutions just work better in order to economize space: when going on vacation or visiting grandma, it’s better not to have to carry around a bunch of books.

The pandemic has also shown how necessary these solutions are for schools. We have initiated collaborations with several Dutch schools to address this. Digital tools are just a part of life for children today. In fact, in many cases, they have come to expect having everything available to them in this form. Reading storybooks is always a good idea, but doing so digitally in no way diminishes the incredible added value that daily reading provides. In reality, the most important thing is for your child to feel your love and attention when using such a device, and Wingzzz is absolutely a suitable means for this.

- Wingzzz is constantly being expanded, not only with new story content but with sort  of accessibility lesson plan functions (a wide variety of activities, slide shows, etc. based on the stories). What determines the direction you decide to go in?
- We seek the advice of educators, narrative psychologists, and story-tellers, and we use what we learn from these conversations. In the long run, we can provide parents with guidance on what they can “also do” related to the stories, apart from just reading them aloud to your children. We would like to provide ideas for activities you can do together, ideas for spending quality time together based on the stories, We dont intend to break the tried-and-true mold of curling up with a good book but, children and parents can stay in the world of the story with things like games, baking or cooking projects, slideshows, or other adventures.

The application made its debut in June of this year. That’s when the library became available online. The current version contains Hungarian, Dutch, and English language stories, this is the first version and still needs some development. At the same time, it already contains the basics users expect from such a platform.

Our library currently contains almost 200 books but we are in a intensive development period. For the near future, we will soon be adding several hundred pieces of beautiful, high-quality story content.

- What about user feedback: what does the target audience say? How do the children feel about Wingzzz?
- My children really love it, We read from it every day. They enjoy the fact that both their mom and dad can read them the same story because it’s available in both languages. Of course, with older children, you can practice reading together as many children today are more enthusiastic about doing so on an online device. During the course of development, we emphasized the creation of an easy-to-use interface, making reading a fun experience for both the children and the parents. Kids can use the application easily too, the fact that they can choose, open the different books, flip through the pages, zoom in on an illustration, skip forward or back in a story. This all adds to the experience. We feel it was the right choice to create a calm, clean, simple interface instead of a flashy, busy one. Overall, we’ve gotten a lot of very positive feedback.