Introducing Mattie MoreOrLess!

It's been a fascinating few months for the team formerly known as 'Mice of Mischief'. We set out with a very clear idea of what we wanted to do - to create an iPad game for children with Down's Syndrome based around the concept of magnitude.

But actually coming up with a simple and fun game based around magnitude proved extremely tricky! I believe there are two main reasons for this. The first is that we want the game to be accessible for players of any ability, which means that some may be pre-verbal and pre-number. In the research that we're using as the basis for the game, the children are presented with two cards containing arrays of different numbers of dots and then asked to select which array is the greater. This is testing the child's "number sense" - their instinctive feel for magnitude (or quantity), not their ability to count. The hypothesis is that this feel for magnitude underpins all subsequent learning around number.

Now, it turns out that when you try to use this simple array selection as the basis for a game, it starts to become surprisingly complex. Inspired by Dots, we thought about creating an arcade-type game that is simply a quick-fire "choose the larger array correctly as many times as you can in 30 seconds" proposition. This would be all about reflexes and high scores, but we then questioned whether this was right for children with Down's Syndrome. We wanted our players to keep coming back to the game repeatedly in order to practise through repetition in order to develop and improve their number sense. Time constraints, a lack of story, and the pressure to get the right answer are not necessarily ideal for our primary audience.

So we realised that story and humour were key. We started looking at couching the array choice within an engaging narrative. This led us to come up with the "Mice of Mischief", in which we planned to use the array choice to allow the player to select the amount of materials to use in a trap for a Rascally Lion trying to steal their cheese. Whilst the Young Coaches loved the idea of making traps, the problem was that the array choice actually started to hinder the trap-building rather than help it.

At this point, we started to interrogate everything and think philosophically about the game we wanted to make. I believe children learn best if they have the freedom to try things for themselves and play in their own way. So we came up with the idea of creating a kind of digital sand-pit that would allow players to use quantity and magnitude to do really fun things almost without realising that they were learning.

But again, when we started to incorporate the choice of arrays, it felt like they were getting in the way of the play rather than driving it.

So philosophy be damned!

Finally, having considered what felt like all the options and then some, we had a breakthrough - a game that puts the array choice front and centre, makes it fun, challenging and addictive in itself, and at the same time drives a really entertaining story.

I'd like to introduce you to THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF MATTIE MOREORLESS!

Now that we've cracked the concept, everything is rolling along at a gathering speed - artwork, level designs and a gameplay prototype will soon be appearing on these journal pages. Having spent several months soul-searching and questioning our ability (why was something so apparently simple proving so tricky?!), suddenly, we all feel incredibly excited, inspired and productive. I guess that's creativity for you!

We spent a long time at the thinking stage, but I honestly believe that our rigour and stubborn refusal to settle for anything until we knew that it was right, will pay off in spades. Something amazing this way comes!