Welcome to Making Monster Magic, where we take you behind the scenes at Teach Your Monster! We’re working on a new version of our flagship game, Teach Your Monster to Read, and want to bring you along for the ride. Every month, we want to shine a spotlight on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and why we’re doing it! 

In this issue, we find out why we’ve made this big decision to update our most popular phonics game.

Why update Teach Your Monster to Read?

We know what you’re probably thinking – why make a next-generation version of Teach Your Monster to Read? The existing game is beloved by millions of players around the world, and the great news is, we are keeping in all the stuff you love. But the original game was built over 10 years ago, and despite making updates, we need to make changes so we can meet the latest educational research, and incorporate all of our users’ (that’s you!) feedback.

Rebuilding the game from the ground up with new design, code and software gives us the foundations to make the changes needed and allows us the flexibility to keep on growing, building new features and, most importantly, adding exciting new monsters for years to come!

What are our reasons for updating the game?

Here are the top benefits of rebuilding Teach Your Monster to Read:

• Creating a next-generation learning to read game ready for the next ten years of learners.
• Adaptive gameplay (as mentioned in the last issue, read the article here)
• Supporting learning in the USA, as well as the UK.
• Integrating new research and theory of how kids learn to read.
• Developing games with our users and responding to feedback.
• Making the game more accessible and inclusive.
• Encouraging children’s independent play and healthy engagement.
• Adding ways to measure impact to get useful feedback and understand how effective the game is.
• Flexibility to add new features and improvements.

In upcoming articles, we’ll be discussing each of these benefits in more detail, so watch this space…

Why now?

We thought we’d get the lowdown from the person in charge of setting our goals and strategy here at Teach Your Monster, our Executive Director, Antonio Gould.

“We’re very proud of what we built with Teach Your Monster to Read. The original team developed and built something absolutely amazing, and it has created an enormous amount of impact over the last 14 years. It’s still going strong.

It’s probably lasted longer than the vast majority of digital products in education or in any other form. And the fact that it’s still delivering to over a million kids, parents or teachers using it every month, it’s pretty incredible. In fact, we’re getting teenagers coming back to us and saying that they used this as kids! 

But no product, whether digital or otherwise, goes for this long without some point needing some serious updates. We want to secure its legacy for the future and enable us to deliver the same (or even more) impact for the next ten years. That’s the real reason to do all of this.”

The main pillars for this decision were threefold:

1. User Feedback – the last 14 years have given us a lot of information from our users. 
2. New research – New findings of how children learn to read and how kids use technology now, as well as some of the things that parents and teachers are mindful of.
3. Potential to expand – “We really, really want to expand the number of kids that can use it now and in the future. So that’s why we’re introducing US accents alongside the UK accent.”

Antonio has big dreams for the future of Teach Your Monster to Read:

“We’re not just thinking about teaching reading in the US and UK, but creating a product that could be localised to any language in the future. It’s one of the things I’m most excited about with all of this.”

Our new generation version of Teach Your Monster to Read has so much more potential for growth, inclusion and expansion – we can’t wait to grow up alongside your little readers at home.

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 work, including…

• Integrating the US curriculum.
• Balancing fun and learning.
• Playtesting in schools.
• Testing with parents and teachers.
• And of course, how we work with experts to make this all happen.

We want to hear from you!

As we’ll be discussing in future posts, our players and users, kids, parents, and teachers, 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 💙