Sago Mini School
Launched 2020
Sago Mini School is a new learning platform that builds early reading, math, sciences, and problem solving skills. We designed a series of activities based on topics loved by kids like bugs, trucks, and rainbows!
As Play Designer, my responsibilities were:
Generate and design the activities
Work with educators to meet learning goals
Collaborate with developers and artists
Play test designs and present findings
Read Along Activity
Who doesn’t love a good story? It was a no-brainer that one of the core activities had to be reading. This activity was designed to introduce the building blocks of reading.
Learning Objectives
For each activity, I worked closely with our team of educators. They helped us understand the kids’ development stages and learning strategies.
Reading is from left to right
Pictures relate to words
One spoken word is one written word
It’s all about the story.
Our first step was to create content to work with. We reached out to some awesome children’s authors and illustrators to help us write new stories. I worked closely with them and even wrote a few of my own!
Not all fun and games.
Being a play designer means you get to be goofy and play at work! But the job also requires a deeper level of attention in order to perfect the details that are important to kids.
A different way of prototyping.
Normal prototyping tools couldn’t really do what I needed. Play design is not screen to screen design or pagination. There are so many tiny nuances that was difficult to describe or spec out. So, I would use a combination of tools like Flinto and After Effects to prototype concepts and interactions.
The goal was to focus on the story but add a little magic on the side.
A narrator reads the story out loud and the kid follows along. As the narrator reads, the words animate, and the kids can tap each word to repeat them. The added fun is, by rotating or pulling the tab, the kids can alter the story.
Maybe the cow crossed the street?
Word modifier kids can use to change the story.
Sentence animates left to right as words are read out loud by narrator.
Word modifier relates to image.
Kids can tap words to repeat.
Interactive tab to change word modifier.
Artwork by Rebecca Tell
All the activities!
The Read Along Activity was just one of many. There was also mazes, building blocks, obstacles, counting and drawing. I also worked a bit on the app architecture.
Artwork by Rebecca Tell and James Tuer
Play Testing Methodology
Thursdays were wild at the office! Our little testers would show up excited to test the latest and greatest toys. I wanted to find a way to conduct test sessions that was more independent and engaging. One of our educators mentioned the concept of Parallel Play.
With that, I created the idea of a Play Centre. Instead of sitting on the couch waiting for the kids to come over, I mounted the iPads onto the table and the kids could approach them on their own accord. I recorded the sessions using two cameras, one capturing the face and the other hands. The footage is then analyzed post play to inform the designs.
Parallel play is a form of play in which children play adjacent to each other. Children usually play alone during parallel play but are interested in what other children are doing.
