CRABTREE PLUS: STEM GAMES

Client: Crabtree Publishing

We created websites, games and animations for Crabtree Publishing to provide digital content to launch with their new science and engineering (STEM) book series, Crabtree Plus. The games were made for the books titled: “Be An Engineer” and “Catch a Wave”. We worked on the whole brand for these games, designing the characters, world and setting to take Crabtree’s textbook content into the digital age. 

Be an Engineer
The Build a Treehouse simulation is designed to teach children the engineering design process of Ask > Brainstorm > Model > Test and Improve > Communicate. It walks the user through these steps as they help the characters, Ava and Finn, to design a treehouse for them and their friends to play in.

The Build a Structure simulations asks the player to choose one of four structures and to examine the environment in which they are to be built. Taking cues from the environment (for example, “The ground is made of loose soil and rock”) the player makes decisions about the best designs, materials and tools to create their structure. Each path of decisions leads to a unique animated payoff, showing either a successful build or the collapse of your structure!

Catch a Wave
The games for Catch a Wave were designed to teach children about waveforms: Make and Wave and The A-Maze-ing Robot. Make A Wave is a representation of an oscilloscope in HTML5. Players can experiment with the controls and learn about the properties of waves: Frequency, Amplitude and Wavelength. The player receives information from the characters as to the properties of the waves as they play. The A-maze-ing Robot was a game designed to show how information is encoded in radio waves. The player must select different wave forms to tell the robot to move up, down, left and right to collect all of the screws and complete the maze.

It was great making these games and simulations full of educational content. Figuring out how to present the curriculum in an engaging way was challenging fun, as was designing the characters and world. We also produced the animations on the website that show Ava and Finn solving even more science and engineering problems. 

The content is available here - contact us for access codes.

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