Educational game

I'd love some input thinking through an idea. I have a 1st grade child and he's been having issues with spelling and he hates doing spelling homework... I thought to make a simple-ish game that you could input his vocabulary words into.

I don't want to do anything crazy involved... I'm an artist not a coder :/ but I'm working on learning and this would be a project I could really get behind.

I was thinking maybe incorporating a puzzle platformer or something? But I'm not sure how the two ideas would go together... or at least how to code it... or maybe something even more simple, like a hangman type game? maybe a mix of the two... maybe a standard platformer but instead of boss battles there would be an educational minigame of some sort?

anyway I'd love some ideas and any suggestions on what type of scripts would be needed to input the words and check the spelling :/

 

At my previous job, we did a lot of educational content. Most were straight up quizes, but for games, we had a standard sort of template of simple game types including platforming, moving a character to catch falling objects, sliding a character around to avoid objects on a path, etc.

In between sections, the student would be presented with a question. If they got it right, they progressed to the next level. If they got it wrong, they got another question and the incorrectly answered one would go back into the mix of questions to be asked. This way they had to answer all of the questions to finish the game.

I only ever wrote code and sent it off to the client to publish, so I don't know what the feedback was on whether the kids enjoyed the games or not.

 

I've got kind of mixed feeling about this thread.
To me it sounds like: please design me a game and give me code snippets that i just have to paste together to finish it.
The cause sure is great though.

I vaguely remember a platformer game where you push letters together to form words to activate things to be able to advance. That was kind of interesing. I just can't find it anymore. It was kind of dark if i remember correctly, so that game in particular wouldn't be something for a 1st grader. But the gameplay was interesting.

But a quick google search spits out hundrets of spelling games. Bet it's the same for appstore / google play if you want to hand him a tablet instead of a PC/Laptop

If it's for your 1st grade child do you really think you need a special custom one, and one of those hundrets available ones would not do it?

 

Oh goodness no, I don't want anyone to design anything for me... if I wanted that I'd throw it out as a collab game of some type since my background is art

There are a lot of spelling games, but I was wanting to a) use it as practice learning unity and b) use a specific set of words. More precisely I'd like to be able to input a list of words to use from his spelling list of around 10 words. Most of what I find are general spelling.

 

The beginning of my programming hobby started around the age of 9 when I wanted software to help with my homework. I would program everything into arrays and have it randomly ask me words. I learned programming and vocabulary, it was great.

As for spelling it would be difficult because you need to convey the idea to spell. As an artist you have a leg up because if the word is armadillo, then you can draw one, but what if the word is quagmire?

You should make your kid enter the words because the extra step will help enforce the spelling. Maybe have the word show up missing some random letters and he/she has to pick the proper ones or something.

You could also integrate with a TTS (text to speech) like google and have it download audio clips of the word and play them for a "hard" mode.

Maybe you could even interface with dictionary.com and get some word usage examples. I think they have an api for that.

 

2 posts in the forum. you need to head over the learn section of this site. there is no shortage of assets in the asset store to make what you what to do reasonably easy

 

maybe if you are artistically oriented, you could try to make some kind of prototype as a board game? just to set up some rules and test them?

 

Prototype a card game/bingo. Have a bingo card with pictures of the words he has to find then make cards with letters on them. Maybe make it like Go Fish where the players ask if the other player has a letter, or maybe each player takes turns drawing a card, & when they can make a word that is on the bingo card they play those letters onto the table; if they spelt it correctly they put a token on the bingo card & the letters are placed in the discard pile, if they spelt it incorrectly they pick those letters back up but now everyone knows what letters they are holding. The winner is the first player to get bingo. When the cards are all drawn the discard pile is shuffled & re-used. Card balancing will require adjustment each time the bingo cards are updated with new words.

Also, if children are learning to read, the game could be played the reverse with the bingo card having the words & the other cards having the pictures. Players need to draw a card from the deck & from another players hand. Once the draw pile is empty they then start taking 2 cards from players (one each from 2 different players). As they get a card that matches one on their bingo card they place it in the table. The winner is the player who collects the 5 images that match a row on their bingo card.

PM me if you are interested in developing this as a paper version as I am in the process of learning how to make paper prototypes into tabletop games so I may have some info that is useful (plus I'd like to be involved if you do as I need to build my portfolio for class).

Good luck

 

Maybe a typer-shooter? Like, you have enemies sent at you and you have to type them to defeat them.

Much like http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/ Typing of the Dead.

 

hmm
maybe like mario but when u get a pickup.. like a mushroom, it asks you the question .. presents the 'problem' and if you get it correct you get the pickup .. and if you fail you dont get the pickup
just an idea that came to mind

cooking with unity aka pushypixels on youtube .. the guy works thru the gamemaking as he goes along .. helped me BIG TIME to pickup the unity workflow
.. maybe autoscrolling platformer?

 

i started making something for you .. and myself i guess ... you got me going! lol i was reading and im like "i could throw something together quick" .. was fun lol
have it to you tomorrow or next day .. gotta sleep soon, ran into little bug i gotta work out

its UI and datalist thingy to hold the words
input words, save em, retrieve em

 

Here you go:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pywsl61qy1xermo/VocabWordsGame - 2-21-2016.zip?dl=0

hope you can learn from it and its not too complicated .. if youre just starting out check out learn section to figure out how unity works
i tried to comment all the code to be easy to understand

i guess theres a few things that could be improved on it .. and i probably will get to it eventually sometime but its pretty cool for now i guess.. like if you load it a bunch of times it just keeps adding... and i wanted to make a scrollView dealy but it was being uncooperative so i moved on with it..

so..
you press the Add + button,
it will add a place to input a word, you type the word in
press Add + and add as many words as you need

press Save .. gotta press Save , when you press it it loads the words into a List that the game references to get its words .. otherwise it will tell you an error...
and it saves to 'PlayerPrefs' so that the word list can be Loaded after you close the game, can load it again next session

Spoiler: bit about PlayerPrefs

which is maybe not the best way to save data in Unity, but it works for now my little example dealy.. and generally just works .. its just not for commercial games cause PlayerPrefs can be changed.. people can cheat. .. and its limited to 1Mb on webplayers ... or mobile? i dunno about mobile or webplayer .. PC guy but yeah.. really PlayerPrefs is fine for this kinda thing

then you can press Quiz Me!
and it shows up a word with randomly missing letters
type it in and press Enter
you have to type in the word Exactly! how it should be

there is a Save 1 and Save 2 .. Load 1, Load 2 .. Delete 1 , Delete 2
so you can save like Week 1, Week 2 or something like that

in a new session you press Load and it will get what you saved in a past session.

i guess the only way to clear it is to Delete .. or close the program .. Delete also deletes from PlayerPrefs the saved data ... so i guess thats one thing that could be improved on..

.. and of course once you get into it im sure you can expand on it all
.. and its maybe not the best way to do the game LOL
obviously, up to you to gamify it

ooh yeah and i guess the UI's scale might be a little big or something, should be easy fix if you need to
lol and there is a cube in the prefab folder .. that does nothing its just a cube oops lol

 

I just spent like 4 hours trying to get the inputfield to save my lists so I could use them before I came back and looked at this thread *facepalm*.... guess you figured it out for me

 

lol actually that was annoying part that took me longer
.. and scrollView and VerticalLayout, Layout Element dealys from the 4.6 UI dont want to cooperate together >< .. its like Unity Bug .. i guess
but i dont know totally about the UI i guess

 

Can you put the fun in the content? If you want to teach spelling, use spelling as part of the game mechanics. I build training, educational, serious games for a living. I've also written a lot on the subject, if you are interested: here, here, and here.

Have fun!
Gigi

 

I have a kid in grade 1 who is also not very good (or interested!!!!) in spelling or reading. I made a hidden object game for him to play based on the word lists they learn in school and since our school curriculum uses a visual reading learning style, this has worked surprisingly well for me. I cheated with an asset store product since I needed something I could customize really quickly (they have new words every week *sigh*). https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50717 worked very well for me. Tossed in new backgrounds, new word lists and new icons - and voila! Happy son and happy mom

 

@LadyAth - That's an awesome story! Thanks for sharing.

 

There are also story telling book frameworks in the asset store if you search.

 

Hii..the same problem I was having with my child and after a long time,I got an amazing app to make my child learn with fun.He is also in 1st grade and learning many things very smartly with this app.
I suggest you to check this app once and your problem will be solved.

App Name-
123 Goobee: Kids Counting Games for Toddlers

 

Can't believe this link still works. Great stuff, new here but I'm inspired to create a kids game based heavily on learning. I got the idea from https://groundsforplay.com/

I get a lot of my gaming ideas from from ideas that work in the real world. I think in order for a game to work, it has to be genuinely fun.

Thank you for this!