Welcome to Making Monster Magic, where we take you behind the scenes at Teach Your Monster! We are working on a next-generation version of our flagship phonics game, Teach Your Monster to Read, and every month we’ll bring you behind the curtain and show you what we’re working on, how we approach it and why we’re doing it.

In this edition, we’ll be discussing how we are introducing ways to measure the positive impact that our game will have on kids’ learning. Stay tuned for some cute monsters we’ve been working on at the end of the article too! 

What do we know already?

We know that Teach Your Monster to Read has had a massive impact on many kids’ lives (many of whom are now teenagers or older):

“I finished it when I was about 6 years old, and this game is still here, and I’ll never delete it. The game is sooooo cool. Even though I’m 11 and I know everything about this game, it still remains a legend…”

Player, Russia

“This app has changed my girl’s life. She was a reluctant reader at first and ended up becoming the best, the fastest and an incredible speller too. She’s now 12.

I used to volunteer in her school to read to children 6-8 who had difficulty with reading, and I told every single parent to force their kids to spend 10 minutes each day on this app.

And guess what… they became incredible readers too.”

Parent, France

“Success! I’ve been working with a child who would not attempt phonics with me and who deleted the phonics app from his mother’s phone. He couldn’t be more enthusiastic about Teach Your Monster to Read and he shouts out all the sounds. Everyone is happy. Thank you creators for developing such a thoughtful phonics programme.”

Teacher, Ireland

The feedback we receive through app reviews, emails, and customer support gives us valuable insight into the difference our games make. Now, we’re building a stronger evidence base to demonstrate this impact. With the new version of Teach Your Monster to Read, we’re embedding this from the start. We’re challenging ourselves to find this data and use it to demonstrate the difference we can make.

How do we measure impact?

Carla Vij, our User Researcher, has been working on a plan with area expert Julie Bélanger from Better Purpose. Better Purpose helps mission-driven organisations like us understand and define the impact they want to make, and monitor and learn from this in a meaningful and practical way.  In simple terms, they help organisations like Teach Your Monster understand how to deliver experiences that make a difference.

Together with Antonio, our Executive Director and Leo, our Product Lead, the team was challenged to define the problem we believe is impacting kids’ reading today, find solutions we can employ to tackle this problem, and find ways that we can measure how effective those solutions have been.

This is how we defined the problem:

There is a need for pedagogically effective, fun, accessible learning tools that children can use independently — at school or at home — to build their reading skills, improve comprehension, and grow a love of reading.

We then broke the problem down into causes and consequences, covering all aspects of a child’s reading life, so we can properly address them in our plan to measure impact. 

Using a Theory of Change!

Once we had defined the problem, we created a  ‘Theory of Change’ outlining where we are now, what success would look like, and how we will get there.

Here’s the good news. We are already doing much of the work we need to do to make a real difference in the areas we have identified. For example, research into the Science of Reading confirms that children need systematic, scaffolded personalised practice with progression.

💡 Systematic, scaffolded personalised practice is an approach where learning tasks are broken down into small, manageable steps. It provides heavy support at first and removes it over time. Practice is uniquely tailored to your skill level and pace, preventing you from either getting bored or overwhelmed.

To address this, we asked ourselves questions such as, ‘Does the game give explicit instructions in each game, such as corrective feedback?’ The team have built this in from the start, with the characters’ expressions changing once a task is completed, accompanied by sounds and visual cues. So it’s a big YES for this one. But how would we know it’s actually helping kids?

Measuring the difference our game makes.

For this example, we’d use a combination of our expert’s feedback (to confirm that the games are using the current best pedagogical methods for providing feedback), user surveys and anonymised play data extracted from the game itself.

This way, we can create clear markers for comparison and use this data to make evidence-based improvements to the game. 

Of course, this is only one example of many that we will address using our Impact Framework. This important groundwork has already been massively helpful in structuring our thinking about how much impact our game has, and although there’s still a lot of work to do, we now have a clear plan to follow.

So there you have it! A quick overview of the process and tools we’re using to ensure we are making a real difference to children.  Engaging early readers in that crucial window is critical and can make a huge difference to later reading skills, as well as foster a lifelong interest in reading.  The Impact Framework is designed to help us achieve that, as we constantly evaluate and improve the game. With it, we hope to create our most effective and engaging reading game for young readers yet!

What are we working on right now?

We’re working on so many different aspects of the game currently, but in future posts, we’ll be touching on some of the work that goes into making this game a fun, valuable learning tool, including…

• Making our new ‘Your Monsters’.
• Creating the very popular Monster Customiser and costumes.
• Bringing the game to life with voiceover artists and sound effects.

We want to hear from you!

As we’ll be discussing in future posts, you are fundamental to how we develop and improve our games. We want to hear from you. How do you feel about this update? Any must-haves you believe should be included in the new Teach Your Monster to Read? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know what you think via this Google form, and we’ll read every response.

Thank you for being part of the journey

More updates soon 💜