HITN Wins Two Parents' Choice Awards for Highest Quality Children's Educational Apps

USA - English

• USA - español

NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- HITN, a non-profit, Spanish-language media network that provides educational programming to more than 44 million American households, won two 2017 Parents' Choice Awards for Mobile Apps. HITN's Pocoyo Playset: 3D Shapes earned the highest Parents' Choice Gold Award and Pocoyo PlaySet: Let's Move won a Parents' Choice Silver Honor, after also scoring a 2017 Kidscreen Award this month. Both programs help preschoolers, early learners and transitional Kindergartners up to age 5 develop English-language skills needed for a successful start in Kindergarten. Full of originality and familiar characters from the animated Pocoyo series, the apps entertain while teaching children to enjoy learning. The Parents' Choice Foundation is a nationally respected resource that helps parents and educators make informed choices about which products are best for their children.

The Parents' Choice Gold Awards are given to children's books, toys, games, videos, software, apps, magazines, audio recordings, and television programs that are judged as the highest quality, most appealing products in their genre. Criteria for judgments include the highest production standards, universal human values and a unique, individual quality that pushes the product a notch above others. Only four apps received this highest honor, including Pocoyo Playset: 3D Shapes. Parents' Choice Silver Honors are for excellent products that came in a close second to the Gold winners. Pocoyo Playset:  Let's Move, was one of four apps to earn this honor.

"Our Pocoyo Playset apps are designed to give preschoolers positive learning experiences on tablets that they already enjoy," said David Rust, General Manager - Education at HITN. "Earning two Parents' Choice Awards for these educational apps is a major accomplishment, acknowledging the quality and effectiveness of our apps in helping children learn and prepare for Kindergarten, which can lead parents and educators to discover our preschool learning resources. The apps can give children a real head start learning English words about their world that they can use now and on their path to Kindergarten."

In Pocoyo Playset: 3D Shapes, children ages 3 to 5 join Pocoyo and his friends as they learn and explore six three-dimensional forms: the sphere, cube, rectangular prism, cone, cylinder, and pyramid in five play modes. It is a fun and engaging educational app which helps children learn about common shapes through playing with the games and activities included. Children learn to name, explore, identify, describe, analyze, compare, sort and construct common 3D shapes. As activities progress, they get to use these shapes to create toys. These activities develop the language and concepts needed for school success.

Pocoyo Playset: Let's Move also features Pocoyo characters, in activities that teach English and Spanish words describing different kinds of movement. Children can play Get Moving, Pocoyo Says, The Word Machine and Story Maker activities. Preschoolers build fluency in spoken English and expand their English vocabulary learning words, while also sharpening their listening skills and ability to follow directions.

The Pocoyo PlaySet apps were developed by the Early Learning Collaborative (ELC) between HITN and Zinkia Entertainment, the creator of the award-winning animated series, Pocoyo. HITN's creative design and focus on solid academic and social-emotional skills were brought to life through the renowned and revered Pocoyo brand, and through the support of a $30 million Ready-to-Learn grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Pocoyo Playset educational resources were proven effective through summative studies and pilots in the USA and Puerto Rico.

The entire suite of 15 Pocoyo PlaySet apps are available on the Apple App Store and GooglePlay.

HITN is the leading Spanish-language media network focused on educational and cultural programing for the whole family. It reaches over 44 million homes across the United States and Puerto Rico through DIRECTV, DISH Network, AT&T U-verse TV, Verizon FiOS TV, Comcast, Charter Spectrum, Frontier Mediacom, CenturyLink Prism, and Cablevision. For more information, log in to www.hitn.org.

About Zinkia Entertainment, S.A. (Zinkia):
Zinkia does more than just produce animated content; it creates entertainment brands for family audiences, with 360º marketing strategies for its brands. Zinkia engages in direct commercialization, licensing, distribution and advertising for its multiplatform content. The company is known for its innovative and creative projects, among them the award-winning preschool series Pocoyo™ and the international hit Shuriken School.  http://www.zinkia.com/

SOURCE HITN

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