tl;dr: Classic playground games like tag and tic-tac-toe are actually great building blocks to teach a wide range of concepts.
It was Father’s Day at my kid’s school, and I was pulled aside by my child’s favorite teacher. She knows I build games for a living, and so asked for some input on building a simple game for her class. Curious about what she had in mind, we settled on a time to chat before I rejoined the day’s festivities.
Time To Reflect
Needless to say, my mind began to churn regarding what it might take to make educational games for early learning students. Another dad and I had created a couple of simple games to encourage familiarity with math that were a hit with our kids, so I started to break those down. We call one especially popular mod ‘El Lobo Matematico’ and it is a twist on tag, or “Lobo/Wolf” as it’s known at the school.
At the core, the pursuer has to tag the other players, but the players can freeze the ‘wolf’ if they solve the simple addition or subtraction problem the wolf continues to repeat. Since the adults always end up playing the wolf, it was a way to make it less about speed and more about quickly adding and subtracting to stop the wolf..
Understanding What Works
The common thread between this and our other game mods was that they began with games the kids already knew. Then we would add an instructional element. This made the experiences familiar and fun, while highlighting the learning we were targeting. For example, we also play ‘Box Tic-Tac-Toe’. The original goal of this mod was to build the skills required to eventually play the board game Battleship. To that end, we drew a box connecting the tips of the classic tic-tac-toe grid and added letters along the top and numbers down the side. The kids were no longer allowed to mark on the grid, instead they had to write down the coordinates where they wanted to place their ‘X’ or ‘O’ (i.e., to start at the center, they had to communicate B2). Through this wrinkle, the kids are introduced to a coordinate system and practiced basic writing, all while playing a game they already knew and loved.
Game Jam Time
A few weeks after our initial Father’s Day conversation, the teacher and I sat down to discuss her vocabulary game idea in detail. She wanted to give students a tool to practice identifying vocabulary images and saying their names. Our first thought was a visual bingo, but this class of four-year-olds had not been exposed to that game dynamic yet. However, when I was explaining how Box Tic-Tac-Toe worked, she quickly riffed off the concept. She mentioned that they were avid fans of the underlying game, and that instead of letters and numbers signaling the coordinates, she could use images. For example, starting at the center might become “banana-dog”, and suddenly another variant of the game was born.
Play-testing in the age of LLMs
With the concept solidified, we turned our attention to the digital implementation. The teacher mentioned that she wanted to make this experience digital so that the kids could play at home with their parents. In a familiar refrain, she didn’t want an app that had to be downloaded and preferred a simple url that could be copied and pasted. Backed by just about any popular LLM, it was a challenge accepted. We typed in a description of the game, what we wanted the users to do, and what kind of feedback to provide. A few minutes later we were testing it on our mobile devices, and you can play with an early version here:
Conclusion
My hope is that these games prove to be another avenue to get kids and their parents engaged in learning early vocabulary, and maybe even seed more interest in learning through games. With a little luck, some survey data will eventually help us share that story. If you’re interested in exploring similar educational game concepts or have ideas to share, we’d welcome the conversation at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.
