I Built a Learning Game Where Kids Explore. Now I Need Teachers to Test It.
The other evening, I sat on the living room floor with my eight-year-old nephew, watching him play a very early version of a game I’ve been building in my spare time. The game is simple right now—a small outdoor map with a stream, some trees, and a few hidden spots. The idea was to make a space where kids could explore a natural environment and pick up facts about the plants and animals they found.
I watched him tap a bird’s nest. A little pop-up explained what the bird eats. He read it, nodded, and closed the box. Then he tapped it again. Read it again. Closed it. Then he walked his character down to the stream and stood there for a solid two minutes, doing nothing. I asked what he was doing. He said he was “checking if the water moves.”
That was the moment I realized my game design and his actual curiosity were two very different things.
I’d spent most of my design time thinking about how to present information—how to make the facts interesting, how to space out the discoveries, how to reward him with “points” for finding new things. But he wasn’t interested in the points. He was interested in the water. He wanted to know if the game’s stream actually behaved like a stream.
That small observation has turned into a much bigger question about how kids learn when given a digital space to explore. And it’s the reason I’ve started reaching out to teachers to try the game in their classrooms—because I can only watch my nephew poke around a virtual stream for so long before I realize I need a lot more eyes on this.
The game, for now, has no real name. It’s just a project folder on my computer. The premise is simple: kids navigate a small environment and encounter opportunities to learn—whether that’s reading a sign at the edge of a meadow about local wildflowers or finding a hidden animal burrow and noticing it’s angled away from the wind. There’s no fail state. There’s no timer. The game doesn’t tell kids what to look for. It just drops them into a place and trusts that they’ll look.
That trust is the part that’s hard to code.
I’d originally planned the game as a kind of big, interactive worksheet. You explore, you find things, you fill your “field journal.” But watching my nephew, I noticed he didn’t care about the journal. He cared about the water moving. He cared about what happened when he walked into the water—would his character get wet? He cared about the physics of it, the mechanics of it, not the informational content I’d so carefully loaded into the pop-ups.
Which made me wonder: do kids learn better in digital spaces when the environment itself teaches them, rather than when we overlay lessons on top of it?
That might sound like a grand insight, but really, it’s just me staring at a kid on a tablet and realizing he doesn’t care about my carefully crafted user interface. It’s humbling. It’s also the kind of thing that you can’t figure out just by designing alone. You need classrooms. You need thirty kids with thirty different impulses. You need a teacher watching the whole thing over their shoulder, noting which kids dive into the environment and which ones just wander.
That’s why I’ve started asking around for teachers willing to test it.
I know how busy teachers are. I’m not a teacher myself, but my sister is, and I’ve seen the exhaustion that comes when someone hands her “one more thing to try.” So I’m not asking for much. A class period or two. A way for the game to send me quiet, anonymous feedback on where kids spend their time and where they lose interest. Maybe a quick conversation afterward—one conversation, not an essay.
I’ve learned a few things just from watching kids with test versions at home, and those lessons have shaped what I’d hope to learn from a classroom.
First, kids are never doing what you think they’re doing. When I watched my nephew stand in the stream, I thought he might be bored. Actually, he was checking whether the game had any “real rules” to it. He was testing the water to see if it pushed his character around. When it didn’t, he walked out, slightly disappointed. He wanted the world to react to him. He wanted the stream to be a thing, not a picture.
Second, the best information dump is no information dump. The most engaged I saw him was when he didn’t understand something and had to figure it out on his own. He found a feather near the stream and spent several minutes dragging it around the map, checking if it would float. It didn’t—a limitation I’d built without thinking about it. But he wasn’t frustrated. He was solving a question he’d invented himself. Those questions are the real learning moments, and they’re nearly impossible to script.
Third, kids notice gaps in environments faster than adults do. When I play the game, I see a quiet meadow and think it’s peaceful. When my nephew plays it, he asks why there aren’t any bugs. Why only one type of tree. Why the sky doesn’t change. He’s paying attention to the ecology of the place, not just the content. That’s humbling because it means the game needs to be something closer to a world than a lesson, and building a world is a much bigger job.
The teachers I’ve started talking to so far have pushed back on some of my assumptions, which has been useful. One fourth-grade teacher pointed out that some of her students love collecting information—they would want the field journal to be front and center, not hidden. Another asked what happens when a student doesn’t want to explore at all, who just sits at the starting point and waits for instructions. I didn’t have a good answer to that one. I still don’t.
That uncertainty is partly why I’m asking for help.
I’ve tried a few things to make the game easier to test in a classroom. It runs in a browser, so there’s no install. It saves progress automatically, so kids can stop mid-session and pick up the next day. I’ve built a teacher dashboard that shows, at a glance, which parts of the map students have visited and which ones they’ve ignored. But I’m aware the dashboard is a tool designed from my own assumptions about what’s important, and teachers might look at it and say, “This is not what I need to know.”
That’s fine. That’s the point of asking.
I keep thinking back to that moment in the stream, my nephew standing there in the virtual water, checking if it moved. He didn’t learn a fact that day. He learned something more important—that he could ask his own questions of a digital world and that some questions wouldn’t have answers yet. Maybe that’s the real potential of games like this. Not to deliver curriculum more effectively, but to let kids poke at the edges of a space and wonder what makes it tick.
A classroom, though, is a different kind of space. It has its own rules, its own rhythms, its own thirty kids who each bring different impulses to the screen. I can’t replicate that from my living room. So I’m hoping a few teachers are curious enough to try a game that doesn’t yet know what it wants to be.
If that’s you, I’d love to hear what your students do when the game doesn’t tell them what to do next. I suspect it’ll change how I build everything that comes after.
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