Why I’m Building a Game That Lets Kids Explore (and Why I Need Teachers to Test It)
On a Thursday afternoon, I was sitting at the back of a third-grade classroom, watching a kid named Sam test something I’d been working on for months. Sam is the kind of student who finishes his math worksheet in four minutes and then spends the remaining twenty bouncing his knee and looking out the window. His teacher, Ms. Ortiz, had warned me not to expect much. “He doesn’t do well with open-ended stuff,” she said. “Too much freedom and he shuts down.”
So I watched carefully as Sam opened the game on the classroom tablet. In the game, there’s a patch of fictional land—a hill, a creek, some trees. Nothing flashes at you. There’s no timer. The only instruction is that you can change things. He squinted, dragged the weather slider to “rainstorm,” and watched the creek swell over three virtual days. Then he dragged it to “drought.” The grass turned brown. He made it rain again. Then he tapped a tree, saw that it grew slower during the dry spell, and started fiddling with the temperature.
He didn’t move for fifteen minutes. Ms. Ortiz looked over at me with raised eyebrows. When we debriefed afterward, she said, “He wasn’t gaming it. He was testing hypotheses.” That stuck with me, because the game gives no points, no badges, no progress bars. All it does is let kids change the variables and watch what happens. Sam wasn’t answering questions. He was asking his own.
The reason I’m building this game is that most “educational” games I’ve seen in classrooms aren’t really games. They’re worksheets with animations. You get a question, you click an answer, you get confetti. Kids learn a narrow fact or two, but they don’t get curious about why the answer matters. I wanted to build something where the learning happens because the kid is trying to make something happen—a dam burst, a forest grow, a species survive. The exploration is the point.
But a game like this only works if it genuinely holds a child’s attention. That’s a much higher bar than it sounds like. During early testing at home with my own kids, the results were mixed. My daughter, who loves reading and animals, got deeply absorbed within minutes. She started dragging predators onto the map just to see if the prey population would collapse. My son, who needs clear directions and immediate feedback, found it confusing. He kept asking, “What am I supposed to do?” And that was fair. The old version of the game didn’t give him enough of a reason to poke around.
That pushed me to made the change: I added a seasonal cycle with visible changes, so kids could see their actions playing out over months rather than just days. But it also made me realize I can’t keep testing on my own kitchen table. I need teachers who can watch kids interact with this in a real classroom, where the noise level is distracting, where some kids are bored by anything without a timer, and where curiosity behaves differently.
I reached out to a friend who teaches fifth-grade science. She had the most important question: “But do they actually learn, or are they just messing around?”
I thought about that on the drive home. For a long time, I’ve been preoccupied with the line between play and work. Messing around sounds aimless, but when you watch a kid try twenty things in eight minutes, they’re not being aimless—they’re rapidly iterating. They’re noticing patterns. They’re saying, “Wait, every time I move the water source closer to the village, the crops grow.” That’s not random. That’s science practice. It just doesn’t look like dusting and labeling.
This is not to say that exploratory games always work or are superior to direct instruction. The research is mixed and classroom reality is messy. There are kids like my son who need a scaffold, a little prompt, a clearer goal. There are teachers who have thirty-five minutes to cover a specific standard and no time to let kids wander through an open-ended simulation. I get that. The game I’m building is aiming to be a tool a teacher can use during a free-choice block, not a replacement for the regular curriculum. But I still need to know: Does it hold attention over multiple sessions, or only the first time? Do kids get frustrated when their experiment doesn’t produce an obvious result? Are there students who completely disengage because the game doesn’t tell them they’re right or wrong?
I’m looking for teachers who are willing to try it out with their students. It’s still rough around the edges. The graphics are basic, the audio is minimal, and there are some bugs in the save function that we’re still ironing out. But that’s exactly why I want classroom feedback now, before we polish it further. I don’t want to spend another six months refining features that turn out to be useless in practice. What I need to know is simpler: Does it make a kid ask a question? Does it make them want to try changing something? It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be worth exploring.
I spoke to a kindergarten teacher last week who put it well. She said, “I don’t need another thing that tells me what my kids know. I need something that tells me what they’re wondering about.” I think that’s the heart of it. This game isn’t going to replace lessons or worksheets or direct teaching. It’s not a shiny all-in-one solution. It’s a place where a kid like Sam gets to be curious without somebody telling him when to be done.
The game still has a long way to go. I haven’t figured out how to build in enough guidance for the kids who need more structure, and I’m still deliberating about whether to add any rewards or incentives at all. Some test teachers have said yes, keep it pure exploration. Others have said my daughter will give up after three minutes if nothing “happens” as a reward. Both are probably true in different classrooms.
So I’m putting it out there, asking teachers who are curious to give it a try with their students and send me notes—even messy ones. I want to hear about what bored kids, what frustrated them, what startled them into leaning closer to the screen. If you’re a teacher and this sounds like something your class would poke around with, I’d be glad to send you a version to try. The save system is still a little buggy, and the instructions are thin, but the creek flows, the seasons change, and there’s a small world ready for whatever questions your students bring to it.
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