Making language learning fun!
Let the children play
At Lingumi, we believe that learning and play go hand in hand. When done right, this combination can lead to happy, smart children and satisfied parents. For the past eight years, I have been at the forefront of our game design efforts, collaborating with teachers and developers to create engaging and effective experiences. Each game we create must be scalable and enable teachers to deliver 5-10 minute lessons, teaching English and speaking skills.
What makes a good game?
Lingumi teaches English to 2-6 year olds, so our games need to be accessible for little ones who are new to tablets, as well as those who have already experienced various digital platforms. Keeping this in mind, I established a few core principles to guide our game design. While it's clear that games should be fun and educational, I wanted a way to quickly and easily evaluate the quality of a game concept:
Progression: Is there a narrative and conclusion to the game? Imagine a game that never ends—how boring would that be!
Accumulation: This is an easy way to create motivation to reach the end of a game.
Discovery: Each child is different and will be interested in different things. How can we make interactions or secondary moments surprising and joyful?
Achievement: If kids don’t feel like they’ve accomplished something, they won’t come back to play again. They need to feel proud of completing a task or action.
With these principles in mind, I’d like to share a series of games that I’ve helped produce over the years. My roles have included:
Game design
Wire-framing
Storyboarding
Illustration
Asset creation
Animations
Sound design
Transform the object
In ‘Transform the Object’, children find themselves with a character in the center of the screen—in this case, a frog. Dragging an image onto the frog triggers a transformation, creating a funny and whimsical experience that helps teach single words.
When we tested this activity with kids, we found they loved re-enacting the frog's shocked reactions, adding to the fun and engagement.
Wrap the units
‘Wrap the Units’ comes a bit later in our foundational English course. In this game, children combine sets of nouns, verbs, and adjectives to create full sentences, with the reward being that they get to see their creation in action.
Children love replaying this game until they have explored every possible combination.
Tap and see
In "Tap and See," you tap an object and watch something happen to it. In this scenario, the theme is a scrapyard, where vehicles are satisfyingly crushed one by one to teach vocabulary related to vehicles.
Teachers wanted this game to be versatile, allowing them to teach about various objects like animals or clothes. To achieve this, the reactions are simply videos we can inject into the game. For example, if the game featured animals instead, tapping on them would show a video of the animals in their natural habitat.
Why this all matters?
Every day, thousands of children embark on their English learning journey with Lingumi. It's crucial to keep in mind the significance of crafting experiences that are not just educational, but also joyful and accessible. I'm incredibly proud of the team's efforts in aiding children on their English learning journey, hopeful that we've paved the way for them to explore another language.
In this video, our amazing marketing team has put together a compilation showcasing one child's delightful experience.