Oct → Dec 2014
Ed Tech
Narrative design, Creative Coding
A playful way to learn vocabulary and spelling
For my CIID graduation project, I built an interactive story game where children guide a character from birth to adulthood by typing words. Along the way, they practice vocabulary and spelling—creating a unique character and story every time.
Context
Passion seeks problem
As part of my Master’s in Interaction Design at CIID, I had nine weeks to define and deliver a graduation project. Rather than starting from a concrete problem, I explored my interests in generative design, educational games, and interactive storytelling.
Approach
Starting with a hunch
At the time, interactive storybooks mostly felt like analog stories ported to screens with a few mini-games—barely scratching the medium’s potential. To test this hypothesis, I conducted desk research, benchmarked educational games, visited a children’s book fair, and interviewed a professional illustrator.
I embraced rapid prototyping to quickly generate and evolve ideas. Exploring characters as modular systems, I analyzed cartoon figures and deconstructed them into parts.
Prototyping to learn
Using Processing, I built a procedural character generator powered by an invisible skeleton. This structure defined how each character was drawn, moved, and animated, with parameters editable through simple UI sliders. An early feature—a ‘randomize’ button with smooth transitions between states—turned out to be so fun that I knew I was on the right track.
From the start, I tested prototypes with classmates and later three children from Bjørns International School. The kids highlighted the lack of an overarching narrative and non-player characters. In response, I developed a story that embraced character customization and used text fields as the main interaction. Behind the scenes, inputs were mapped to skeleton parameters and easily editable via a CSV file.
To support storytelling, I built a lightweight video editor where I could script character movements, parameter changes, and speech, then render them as video clips. It became a key tool for producing communication materials for the final presentation and beyond.
Learning through play
The prototype became an educational game where players guide an Oddball from birth to adulthood, evolving its appearance and personality by typing words. Thanks to its generative system, every playthrough creates a unique character and story.
Using fruits and vegetables, players shaped Oddballs’ bodies; adjectives defined their limbs; and feelings set their moods. Spelling had to be correct, subtly teaching accuracy, while the drive to create new Oddballs encouraged children to expand their vocabulary.
Outcome