Last week, our friends at Amplify launched their ambitious tablet product at SXSWedu. You can check it out here. Be sure to watch the video and grasp the whole scope of what they're tackling. Isn't it awesome?! Instant student and teacher feedback. Content where students spend their time: on devices and on the web. A more personalized education experience.

dojo4 couldn't be happier to contribute to this effort by building two content applications for student use. The first is an Encyclopdia Britannica application and the second is a Khan Academy video application. Both proved to be positive challenges with respect to student-focused usability and design, offline media, and Android development. We hope they see some good use!

Regarding development of the EB application for Android, one of my favorite parts of the implementation was around search. A good encyclopedia application has to have good search, right? We ended up using SQLite since, with Android, it ships with the FTS4 extension compliled and enabled. If you haven't used FTS4 virtual tables before, they provide great full-text search indexing capabilities and the MATCH SQL operator. The docs are a bit technical, but very helpful overall once you wrap your head around them.

You can read more from Amplify's CEO here.

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