For a school project, my team and I were assigned the task of creating a game to assist elementary school students in learning to read. We conducted desk research, visited an elementary school, and eventually developed a concept.
As one of my first projects during my first year at my study Creative Media and Game Technologies at Hogeschool Rotterdam, I was assigned with a team to develop a game, using TypeScript, to help elementary school students to read. At first, we conducted some desk research.
There are proven studies about the best way to learn to read or write, I wont go into detail too much, but they tend to start with phonics. Children at first can’t read, so we had to find a method to show them a user interface without any text. The image shows the buttons for levels and chapters, visualised by islands and planets. The plan was to gradually show more text as children expand their vocabulary.
My job was programming the interfaces and levels. All data was retrieved from an API another student wrote, so the styling was also written to be expectant of changes in levels. The first level was a bubble shooter minigame in which the student had to hit the letters in the correct order to form a word.
The name of the game already indicates its theme: children embark on an adventure and learn various letters, sounds, and eventually words along the way. We had different ideas about how to develop the game, but this concept resonated the most. The test group of children at the elementary school came up with the idea to introduce a mascot to accompany them on their adventure. They named him ‘Klankie’ (Phonic).