The exploration game I built for curious kids — and why I’m looking for teachers to test it
I was sitting on the floor of our local library with my nine-year-old when she discovered the map case. The big flat drawers, the faded atlases, the laminated maps marked with creases from decades of use. She pulled one out, spread it across the carpet, and started tracing the river on our side of town with her finger, figuring out where the library sat in relation to the creek, the elementary school, the old railroad track. It wasn’t in the assignment she’d brought home. It wasn’t an educational app. But she stayed absolutely still for twenty minutes, thinking in a way I’d never quite seen before.
That moment stuck with me. Not because it was profound in a movie trailer way, but because it showed me something about how her brain works. When she’s given information, she takes it in pieces and immediately forgets half of it. When she discovers it on her own, she has to fight her way to it. That struggle turns out to be the point.
In my fifth-grade classroom, I started noticing the same thing. My most tired-looking students, the ones who give up fastest on worksheets, are completely different when I step back and let them figure something out. During a science block last spring, I pointed at the window and said, “Figure out where the sun is going to be in two hours just by looking at the yard.” Nobody asked me for the answer. The kids who usually roll their eyes and wait for the smart kid to speak grouped up and started experimenting. They traced shadows with chalk. They complained about the cold. They got it wrong twice. And then they got it.
That’s the energy I wanted to turn into a game. So I built one that’s based entirely on exploring and picking things apart.
It doesn’t look like any game I grew up with. There’s no score, no timer, no boss battle. It’s a quiet world with two ruined buildings, an overgrown courtyard, and a strange object near the garden wall. When players land in the space, they get a single instruction: “Something here is not what it seems. Find out what changes when you pull at it.” There’s no pop-up pointing at the right corner. No glowing trail from point A to point B. Just a world that responds to curiosity.
One of the things I’ve learned while testing it with a few local kids is that “explore freely” is almost never free. If you tell a kid to go wander, they panic a little. They ask what the goal is, what the point is, what to write down. So the trick was to make exploration feel safer by hiding small puzzles. Not as a to-do list, but as something to stumble on. A window that rattles even though there’s no wind. A boot with a torn lining that might contain a note. A fence gate that has been wired shut from the inside.
When a kid pulls at one of those threads, the game doesn’t say, “Good job. Collect your star.” It just lets what happens next be slightly strange enough that they want to investigate. The learning is embedded but never announced. The vocabulary, the reasoning, the cause-and-effect thinking, it all happens underneath the story. They’re not thinking about the states of matter or the physics of sound. They’re thinking about why the glass is vibrating, and the science gets in the side door.
Which is where you come in, maybe.
I’m at the point where I need teachers to try this in real classrooms, not just my kitchen table. I’m not asking for a huge commitment. If you’ve got a spare twenty minutes in a free period, or a morning during indoor recess, I want to know what your students do in that world. Specifically, I want to know what they say to each other while they’re playing, because that’s where all the interesting stuff happens. Do they argue about the clues? Are the quiet kids suddenly taking the lead? Does your one chronically distracted student decide to chase the most impossible theory for ten straight minutes?
What I need from you is messy and human. Screenshots of what a kid typed into the in-game notebook. A note about the moment a group of three all pointed at the same mailbox at the same time and said, “Wait.” That you noticed someone going back to a building they’d already cleared, because something had changed there when they weren’t looking. You don’t need to write me a formal report. I’ll send you a simple set of questions at the end, but honestly, the offhand stuff is more valuable to me than the structured answers.
There are practical tools inside the game for teachers, too. The world includes a space where you can leave a starting question for your kids before they dive in, like “What do you think is preventing the main door from opening?” There are also pause points that stop the game for conversation shifts, so you aren’t trying to drag five kids out of a screen when the bell rings. Those were built because I know the nightmare of trying to transition a class away from something they’ve gotten absorbed in. It’s a thirty-second pop-up with a prompt like “Turn to your neighbor and explain the weirdest thing you’ve seen so far.” And then the game keeps going. It gives the brain a beat, and it gives you permission to gather everyone back without a fight.
We also tried hard to make sure the game lets kids fail without noticing they’re failing. If they ignore the main thread and spend the whole session pulling useless objects, that’s fine. The game doesn’t scold them. If they get stuck, the world doesn’t hand them the answer; it just makes the environment slightly more odd. One of the goats in the pasture starts standing in a place it’s never stood before. A bird begins following the player. It’s not a hint. It’s just enough weirdness to hold attention while the kid works through the problem.
I know from my own classroom there’s no perfect educational tool. When I tested one version of the game with a group of second graders, most of them loved the free-roaming, but one girl sat in a corner and wanted to jump on a rusted tractor over and over because she liked the sound it made. For ten minutes, she did not learn anything. She just bounced. And honestly, I was fine with it. Some days, bouncing on the rusted tractor is what a kid needs. There’s no way to force curiosity into a schedule.
We’re still figuring out the upper grade levels. My middle schoolers are harder to shift. They’ve been trained to chase the right answer, and the quiet ones are used to sitting back while someone else does the figuring. I don’t know if this game can crack that open in the way it works for younger kids. It might for some, and it might not for others. That’s another thing I’m hoping teachers can help me understand.
So if you’re a teacher who has fifteen spare minutes this week, I’d love to send you a code to try it with a small group. There’s no need to plan a whole unit around it. Let a few kids wander through, pay attention to what they mutter under their breath, and send me the best quotable thing they said. The idea isn’t to replace your lessons. It’s to give a few students a chance to find a door, pull it open, and decide for themselves what’s on the other side. If nothing else, it’s a nice way to spend a rainy indoor recess.
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