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 we want to invite you behind the scenes to follow our progress. 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 issue, we find out why we’ve made this big decision to update our most popular phonics game.

How do we even make a reading game?

We’ve told you why we’re making the new version of Teach Your Monster to Read, but how do we even start this process? Furthermore, how do we ensure the game is up to date with the latest research in reading and pedagogically sound?

💡 Pedagogy is the method, practice, and theory of teaching, often described as the “art and science” of instruction. It encompasses how teachers deliver curriculum, interact with learners, and use strategies to facilitate learning.

A key part of our process is that our team works closely with experts in the field to become subject-matter experts themselves, and then applies this knowledge to the design of the game.

Bring in the experts!

For the classic game, the team worked with experts Angela Colvert and Alison Kelly, Senior Lecturers in English Education at the University of Roehampton. From the success of the game and all the wonderful feedback we get from parents and teachers, they have made something really special and impactful for kids’ reading.

Based on this solid grounding, and all the insights and feedback gained in over 14 years that the game has been up and running, our game developers have the best start for approaching this new version, bringing in how teaching reading has changed, how the pedagogy has developed and integrating this into the scope of the new game.

Game Designer and Developer for the new Teach Your Monster to Read, Dawid says:

“We want to take everything that makes the original Teach Your Monster to Read great, which was the design, the mini games, and the ability to play it in short bursts. Then improve on certain elements, like accessibility. Things like fonts: we have fonts that are much easier for children to read. We also have localisation for different accents of English, including British English and American English… with hopes for further localisation later on.”

To make sure we have the right foundations for adding the US accent and pedagogy, we needed a US expert! Our product manager, Leo Allen, with some nifty connections from Nicola Usborne (Managing Director at Usborne Publishing and Founding Trustee of The Usborne Foundation) and Rose Else-Mitchell, a “superstar in the world of EdTech and Children’s Reading”, found the perfect person for the job – Dr Alyssa O’Rourke.

With more than 30 years of research and applied experience, she has worked in a variety of educational roles, bringing deep expertise in literacy, educational assessment, learning disabilities and applied child development.

“I’m Alyssa O’Rourke, and I received my doctorate in applied child development with a concentration in clinical developmental psychology from Tufts University, The Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development. In graduate school, I had the opportunity to work with Dr.Maryanne Wolf on a large-scale intervention study in three cities comparing different reading intervention programs. For the past two decades or more, I’ve worked in clinical research and implementation roles related to dyslexia, learning disabilities, literacy, and the Science of Reading. I am currently a Fellow at the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz. This is where I work with Rose.”

🎓 The Science of Reading Center is a hub of professional learning and development for educators with a shared mission of improving literacy outcomes for children across the U.S., by promoting research-backed knowledge and practices that are proven to help children gain skills and competence as readers.

How do the experts work with the game development team?

Alyssa has worked with the developers to ensure that the pedagogy is focused on explicit and systematic instruction that is grounded in the Science of Reading.

🎓 “The Science of Reading is really all of the accumulated scientific research to date that tells us about reading, and can inform our practice, it doesn’t talk about any one curricula, or any one particular method.” Dr Alyssa O’Rourke *

With Alyssa based in the US, online meetings have been crucial to informing the pedagogical basis to that initial development stage. A large chunk of these discussions was about the scope and sequence of the game, what the pedagogical systems needed to look like and the differences in pedagogy between US and UK pronunciations of GPCs (letter sounds).

“I was going to meetings with Alyssa while I developed the way we organise the US pedagogy framework. That’s obviously different pronunciations from the UK GPCs but also, there are subtle differences in how the content is structured and which GPCs come first, the decodable words, the tricky words and how they relate to each other. Alyssa is still with us, working on all of that.”

Matt Sayers, Game Developer

Regular online meetings allow the team to touch base about parts of the game they’re working on, deep dive into particular aspects of the pedagogy. All the developers really value the support and reassurance that comes with having an expert on board.

“To complete a one-minute game, sometimes we go through multiple rounds of feedback and working with the experts. So I think they can see things that we don’t. For example, we did something in the game because it looked nice or it felt nice, and they want us to change it because it’s not educationally correct. It can be difficult and time-consuming, but I think that’s the really cool thing about working with an expert. And in the process, you are becoming a bit of an expert yourself.”

Dawid Kubiak, Game Developer

We asked Alyssa what her favourite part of working on the game is so far:

“It’s been really eye-opening to see the attention to detail and hard work that goes into creating a product that’s as high quality as this is. And it’s been a joy just to work with all of the different team members and people involved, like Carla, who’s going out into the schools doing the testing and bringing that feedback back. And with Matt and Leo and everyone, just putting our heads together to try to create something that is going to be launched into the world in multiple continents and being able to support and reach that many children is really exciting.”

Supporting the US pedagogy allows us to make even more impact than we did previously and we can’t wait for it to go live.

But what about the UK?

And don’t worry everyone on this side of the pond! It’s important to us to keep all the UK pedagogy we already built in the classic game and develop it further, incorporating all the latest research into reading and phonics. So, not only are we excited to still be advised by our previous expert, Angela Colvert, but we also have a new UK expert, Steph Laird!

Steph taught in primary schools for twelve years before joining Roehampton as a Teacher Fellow. She now lectures in the English Education department as well as helping us with Teach Your Monster to Read! We’ll catch up with her in a later edition of Making Monster Magic coming soon.

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 user feedback from our recent closed testing sessions.
• Getting the balance right between fun and learning.
• Meeting up with our new UK expert, Stephs.

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  💛