| The growth and wide use of the mobile app not only brought significant changes in our social and economic life but also provided promising opportunities in the field of education. The importance of the educational app has been recognized, as is seen by the efforts of educators and app developers in exploring its potential in the field of teaching and learning practices. The mobile app is currently finding its way into Chinese classrooms, where teachers of Chinese use apps to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes. Although the use of these various mobile apps for the teaching and learning Chinese has become a common practice, most of them concentrate on teaching Chinese as a foreign language with few designed for learning Chinese as a heritage language. Moreover, based on the results of a review of existing mobile apps, most of the apps target language learners for self-study or independent learning, but few of them are designed from the language teacher's perspective to support instruction in the classroom. It is also noteworthy that many educational apps for learning the Chinese language are created by software engineers and without the expertise of subject matter experts and instructional designers, and thus the pedagogical knowledge, instructional content, and usability of these applications is not guaranteed in the educational settings.;To support heritage language teachers and maximize the opportunities for student learning, this project aims to understand and explore effective design and development of a mobile app for teaching Chinese as a heritage language. By focusing on teaching Chinese characters or Hanzi, which is a highly laborious, demanding and exceedingly tedious process in learning Chinese, this project attempts to create a high fidelity interactive app prototype from scratch. As a visual presentation of the project outcomes, the design and development process of this prototype is modeled around literature from relevant fields, the analysis of existing apps, and the feedback gained from focus group interviews.;The findings of this project, including the storyboard built upon the functional analysis, the data gathered from the analytics, and user feedback and suggestions collected, could potentially inspire and motivate software engineers in developing future mobile apps for Chinese as a heritage language. Teachers may also find this project helpful for applying similar mobile apps to support instruction and engage students. Last but not least, this project is intended to make contributions to the scarce studies on the use of mobile apps for Chinese in heritage language learning. |
