Dive Brief:

• Despite being one of the top selling apps in the education section of the App Store, Toca Boca won't be selling to American schools or employing a freemium model according to CEO Bjorn Jeffrey.  
• The Stockholm-based game maker spoke with Gamesandlearning.com about the current frenzy around education technology, arguing that there are important things for children to learn beyond "a strict curriculum perspective" and that there is currently a push to market all children-oriented games and activities as "educational" —​ regardless of whether they actually are or not.  
• Toca Boca has over two dozen apps for sale, which in total have been downloaded globally 65 million times.  

Dive Insight:

Jeffrey's poignant interview with gamesandlearning.org offers an interesting and unique perspective on the current education obsession.  While discussing his experience at SXSWedu, Jeffrey said, "I think one of the big things that comes across at the conference is how many people have it as synonymous education and children. They are almost completely the same thing in this context almost ignoring the rest of childhood in a way." Jeffrey argues this conflation has resulted in a heavy focus on education being the solution to all child problems, when in fact there are other important solutions and approaches that technology can tackle.

Touching a bit on the character-education model that has been in the news lately, Jeffrey mentions how instead of focusing on education and what students can learn from a strict curriculum, we should be encouraging collaboration, imagination, and creativity. "There’s a place for that in an educational context but they are also things that can be just learned from doing completely different things," he said.