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 discuss how we strike the right balance between learning and fun in our games and how we ensure that children get the most out of them.

How do we make the game educational?

We make sure our games are in line with the latest educational thinking by keeping an eye on the latest research, following the Science of Reading, US and UK curriculums and the advice of our reading experts. In Making Monster Magic Edition 3, we found out about how the team works with our experts to ensure our games are designed in line with the ways that children learn.

But we can’t just rely on educational value to engage our young players. Many educational games are accused of being ‘chocolate-covered broccoli’ – a game with dull content wrapped in a fun, superficial outer layer. For example, a game where educational facts are taught and answered in order to get a gameplay reward. These types of games are quickly discarded, as they reduce motivation to learn and often don’t teach the right skills. 

When Teach Your Monster started, a key foundational stone set by Peter Usborne, was a strong belief in helping children get the right start in life. Everything we do today still serves this purpose, and getting this balance between learning and fun right in our games is fundamental to helping children become self-motivated learners. We want to make games that kids genuinely enjoy playing again and again, and we go through a thorough design and feedback process to ensure they do.

How do we address the complex needs of kids learning to read?

Darren Garrett, the creative director at Teach Your Monster, oversees the design of our games and has been working with the development team on the new Teach Your Monster to Read.

Having worked on many games for kids, Darren sees a craft and care at Teach Your Monster that is at the heart of what we do. 

“There is a magic in these games that really gets to the heart of learning and fun. There’s an understanding that you’re not going to get to those learning goals without the fun, and it’s a very fine balance you have to achieve. If it’s too much fun, you won’t learn enough, but if the learning is overwhelming or doesn’t engage them , we may lose them. The idea of having the learning be enjoyable in itself motivates children so they don’t need to be pushed, or even encouraged. They will actively want to do it.”

When making a Teach Your Monster game, many general game design principles apply, but to ensure we make the most effective game for kids, there are also developmental needs to consider. Children have different cognitive abilities, motor skills, and information-processing needs that require carefully thought-out mechanisms.

Avoiding cognitive overload is one such need. When there is too much information, young brains can become overwhelmed and start to lose focus. For example, in the new Teach Your Monster to Read, when introducing letter sounds (Grapheme-Phoneme correspondences/GPCs), we’ve decided to really simplify what’s on screen, so the letter is presented with its visual prompt (‘s’ = sun), allowing the player to switch focus from their adventure for a moment and focus entirely on learning that letter-sound.

Some mechanisms in kids’ games feel counterintuitive to designing games for adults. Whereas adults may find repetition tedious in games, it is an essential component in learning for kids. Any parents reading this will probably be familiar with kids asking to watch the same film over and over again and never seeming to get tired of it (long after you have…)

Moreover, repetition is crucial for children with reading difficulties, such as dyslexia. It allows them the space to make mistakes and hear the sound multiple times. You can read more about this in our article about early intervention for children with reading difficulties.

These are just a few of the more practical factors we need to account for when making an educational game for kids. But what about making it fun?

How do we make the game fun?

Darren believes there are five core aspects that go into creating the characteristic fun that is a Teach Your Monster game. 

1. Engaging narrative and storytelling – With the new version of Teach Your Monster to Read, one thing we wanted was to make sure we keep all the magic built up over the last 13 years, and bring that into a new game fueled by new research and the audience’s feedback. Darren stresses the power of storytelling and the importance of keeping an engaging narrative throughout. Expanding on this, bringing reading and storytelling into ALL aspects of the new game, because “that’s how kids really learn to read, through good stories.”
2. Teaching ‘Your Monster’ – one of the great things about our games is that the player can create and customise ‘their monster’, an in-game friend who they teach to read. This takes the focus off the child ‘learning to read’ and puts them into the powerful position of ‘teacher’ to their monster.
3. The look and feel -Strong design, light and magic in the visuals encourage children to explore and discover new things. Also adding a bit of silliness through the characters and environments to find ways to make the kids laugh- and keep them engaged.
4. Gameplay – Learning through play has always been our approach, so we make sure the gameplay is fun and motivates players to play repeatedly in an ethical, wholesome way. We never use dark patterns such as streaks or aggressive reminders to encourage play.
5. Sound Design and Animation – All sound and animation serve to reinforce learning and give the player immediate feedback when playing. These visual and auditory cues “make them feel good about getting the right answer, while not making them feel bad about getting a wrong answer“, allowing the child to make mistakes and learn without feeling shamed.

All the above plus we add the special secret Teach Your Monster Magic! 

All of these aspects are built and scrutinised through knowledge and feedback from the team, our experts and our user testers, to make sure they are the most fun.

“Hundreds and hundreds of design decisions have an effect which is often greater than the sum of the parts. Sometimes it’s very subtle, and sometimes they’re very small decisions, but they all come together to make the games so strong and create the magic.”

Darren, Creative Director

How do we make it balanced?

Making the best reading game we can is not just about making it fun, but about balancing the game design with the learning. This means properly integrating those aspects, so it’s not just ‘chocolate-covered broccoli’. You’re examining the gameplay and learning, to make sure that they’re not just balanced, but also harmonised. 

“If the learning aspect took you out of the game, that would feel jarring. Or if the gameplay took you away from the learning or felt incongruous to the experience, that would feel jarring. You want to feel that the whole learning and gameplay world is seamless. You’re not jumping between different experiences; It wants to feel all part of the flow. You’re making sure that they are properly integrated through the story and design,” Darren.

Learning is embedded in the design, and design serves the learning. So how do we do this?

We start with the learning goal first. We ask: What is the purpose of the game? What is it trying to teach? What do we want this game to achieve? This creates creative boundaries and restrictions that help us focus our ideas so we can then ask: what is a fun and entertaining way we can do that? Does this cover everything we need to consider? From here, the development team get to work, getting feedback from experts to ensure the learning goal is met.

It doesn’t stop after designing the game either. Using that learning goal as a benchmark, we playtest every aspect with our users, children and adults, asking questions like: Is it delivering on the learning goal? Is it intuitive to play? Is it fun? Does it stand up to repeat plays, aka are they getting bored? If the answers to any of these are no, we iterate or take it back to the drawing board.

This careful iterative process between the team, our experts, and our users helps us to create that harmonious gameplay and learning experience, ultimately keeping our most important users, the kids, engaged from start to finish – and often having so much fun they don’t realise they’ve been learning all along!

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…

• Sound design – adding the sound effects and music with Simon Panrucker and Thomas Williams!
• Conducting summer playtests with kids.
• Working on the in-game rewards.

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

Existing users of Teach Your Monster to Read will get free of charge access to the new version of Teach Your Monster to Read. For more information about the new app, we have a new Frequently Asked Questions section in our help pages which you can visit. It will answer most questions about the new update and give you all the information of what we know so far.

More updates soon 💙