color scheme - Should software for 8 to 14 year olds be colourful and "childish"?

I am developing a learning application for children somewhere between 8 and 14 years as part of my masters degree in Computer Science. I have absolutly no formal UI design background and in the past wrote all my applications based on what seemed intuitive to me. But as my target audience is now vastly different from what I am used to I started looking around.

The program I am creating is somehow similar to Scratch (but about databases, not general purpose programming). Scratch's core design, the programming language, is very colourful. I do see that these colours form a very clear visual hierarchy which is obviously useful when dealing with an abstract topic like program flow.

But it's not only Scratch: Most stuff for children looks a little wacky to me.

So this got me thinking: If "everybody does this", should I also start to use some distinct colour schemes in my application? What are the research papers or general best practise guides I could follow when developing for children? As this is part of my masters thesis I would love to have something formal I could cite. But simply googling stuff such as "Why should childrens applications be colourful" did not take me very far.

Below is a very rough draft of the colour scheme I have thrown in. Apart from "errors are red" those colours do not have any kind of deeper meaning.

Answer

What you have described here is not 'childishly' colourful - The colours represent different information: the colour has meaning beyond decoration.

Scratch colour codes its code blocks according to what type of element they are (variable, logic operations, flow operations, etc) in a similar way that Sublime Text (and many other code editors) does:

This is certainly not childish - this is sensible information management. Beyond the code blocks, the rest of the Scratch interface is mostly a sober grey - not 'wacky' at all.

"Wacky colour schemes", provided that they are executed with care and attention to detail, can aid the initial uptake of software aimed at younger children simply because it's attention grabbing and feeds on their experience of toys and books (possibly related to how eyesight develops in babies - stronger colours are easier to discern for young eyes). However, the age range that you specified (8-14) spans a period where younger children are also starting to affect more adult sensibilities. Older children may reject brightly coloured (in the decorative sense) software as too childish in favour of more restrained and refined adult styling.

Your proposed colour scheme looks reasonable with the caveat that some of the brighter colours can make text hard to read (try them with a colour contrast analyser). If you're consistent with your colours and don't head too far into 'wacky' then you should be OK.