the approach

attention first. everything else is built around where a kid's attention actually goes, not where a lesson plan says it should.

placeholder text. these are the working rules from building the first game, written down before anyone had tested them on a child. they will be rewritten when someone has.

what we do

start with the lure

the beat, the pop when a pill fills, the animals that move to the song. none of that is a reward for learning. it is the door. if the lure is off the beat, it doesn't lure, so the sound and the pictures run on one clock and the clock is the first thing we get right.

make the next move a decision

under the noise is a game of edges that must match and points that come from somewhere. a kid who is only pressing buttons runs into a choice within a few seconds. the choice is the lesson. nothing announces it as one.

keep the steps small

the first game was built the same way it is meant to be played: one small change at a time, checked at once, kept or thrown away. short rounds, quick feedback, no long setup. a mind that runs on tangents comes back easily when the thing it left was small.

let the tangents count

a tangent is not a failure of attention. it is data from a different place held at the same time. the music in the first game came from a tangent; so did the map and the open research. the rule we are trying to learn: when a tangent is taken, keep a thread back, so it adds up instead of getting lost.

what we won't do

• no streaks that shame you for a day off.
• no loot boxes, no gacha, no spending to progress.
• no timers that punish. a beat to move to is not a clock that counts you down.
• no ads, no selling what a kid does in the game to anyone.
• no claims we haven't measured. see the research page for what has and hasn't been.

the three subjects

math, geometry, and music, because they meet in the same place. three edges on a tile. three notes in a chord. three is the smallest number that makes a shape, and the shape is where counting turns into something you can see and hear.

the next game on this engine is the one where the tiles make the music: a tile is a series of notes played in order, tiles that join play their shared edge, and the pattern repeats to build a counter melody. a learning tool for trigonometry and music theory that should have always existed.