-- Situation

Building fundamentals for future development and preparing children for the everchanging world is getting more important every day.

Together with Ottiya, we went out to search for an approach to teach even the youngest generation of schoolgoing children the basic principles of coding.

-- Problem

Our main focus during this project was to teach children the principle of sequencing actions, while finding a way to keep it fun and engaging.

The second goal we aimed for, is that we wanted our product to stimulate children to think ahead, use their curiosity and their want to be involved with others.

-- Action

We organised multiple sessions to see how children interacted with our ideas and prototypes. We found that using a story worked wonders, and asking them to help our mascot Otto to find his family did even more.

After consulting with Ottiya for the details on building the educational approach, we developed an interactive prototype in Figma. To conclude our project, we reached out to an after school care faciility, which helped us incredibly with validating our ideas.

-- Result

At the end of the ten weeks of this project, our team had developed a game in which the main story is about an otter called Otto who lost his family during a storm. With the help of shells that give him his nutrition, the children can help him get back to his family.

While the kids work their way through the levels, they are introduced to new and more advanced coding blocks. With a combination of the different blocks, Otto can move his way through the levels.

The childen wanting to play more levels than we had brought with us to the testing session (we brought 6), told us we had created a product which kids felt engaged with and motivational enough to keep going.