bringing a game to life
Designing and coding a flower shop game to support developmental research.
role
Product Designer & Developer
Timeline
June - Sept 2025
Tools
Procreate, Unity
Organization
Davis Media Lab
wreathies
Exploring Agency in Play
The Davis Media Lab conducts developmental research on how media and technology influence children’s learning. Many educational games offer limited choice in play, even though exploration is important for learning. Since there is little research on this topic, this app serves to help us answer questions about how children learn from interactive media. As the lead product designer and developer on the team, I created the game that brings this research direction to life.
game goals
Understand how agency influences engagement and learning.
Create game variations tested at a children's museum.
my role
As the sole product designer and developer, I designed the game mechanics, produced the visual assets, and built the playable prototypes in Unity. Throughout the project, I partnered with the research team to run testing sessions with children and refined the design based on ongoing critique and feedback.
solution preview
Start screen.
Gameplay screen.
one game, many goals.
I wanted to create a game that collects meaningful data while being fun, intuitive, and visually appealing. For concrete data, a measurable skill had to be targeted.
📍 Currently playing at the Museum of Science and Curiosity of Sacramento.
secondary research
understanding the game Landscape
To better understand the position of children’s interactive media in American society, I read up on academic papers analyzing digital learning games, played countless hours of online games, and met with a Common Sense Media director to get insight on the parent perspective. I summarized my findings into these insights.
key game elements for success
Filler text for now. With an understanding of what the game needed to have, I moved onto the brainstorming session of how this can be implemented in an interactive experience.
ideation
To capture themes of growth and creativity, we explored nature-inspired ideas such as gardening and flower breeding. We ultimately chose a flower shop concept where children take on the role of the shop owner, designing wreaths for customers. This idea incorporated counting and spatial reasoning skills in an engaging way.
Flower shop concept
🧠
player objective
Create wreaths with the correct fractions and colors for each order.
🧠
skill tested
Understanding fractions.
Basic arithmetic.
Pattern recognition.
create collage of ideation images - in a beautiful way
ideation time
Now that our team had a solid idea of the game, we could move onto testing to see how our concept stacks up to children.
TESTING ROUND 1
PRESCHOOL TESTING
My team and I visited a local preschool to get a sense of how children like our concept. We used whiteboards and flower magnets to play and asked them open-ended questions about how what they liked, wished, and wondered about the game.
Our testing setup
👆 satisfying interactions
The magnetic clicks kept children engaged in play.
🙌 Pride in Creating
Children enjoyed creating wreaths and felt proud of what they made.
📝 needed clearer instruction
Some children needed more guidance to follow the wreath orders.
Testing our concept helped us refine our concept further. We made sure to address the instruction deficiency. We narrowed the skill tested to fractions so we can quantify learning in testing, now we had a more refined game concept.
A clearer concept
flower fraction game
We landed on a game that focused on fractions as the testable skill. The child completes 10 wreath requests, each order increasing in difficulty.
First digital game rendition.
Validation testing
We tested with 20 UC Davis students to validate our designs. Here are the results.
Map Markers
85%
understood vote size and color.
Vote Breakdown Graph
65%
reported improved understanding of temperature trends.
Map Filters
60%
found filtering intuitive and useful.
success stories
85%
learned about heating and cooling.
Next steps
learning lessons
bringing a game to life
up next…
solution preview
Vote breakdown graph to increase transparancy.
THE CHALLENGE
one game, many goals
I wanted to create a game that balanced research objectives with player engagement. The game needed to be fun, intuitive, and visually appealing while collecting meaningful data. It is now being played at the Museum of Science and Curiosity in Sacramento.
secondary research
To better understand the position of children’s interactive media in our society, I read up on academic papers analyzing digital learning games, played countless hours of online games, and met with a Common Sense Media director to get insight on the parent perspective.
Early Insights
To succeed, the game needs:
Engagement
Progressive difficulty.
Recognizable patterns.
Consistent level baseline.
agency and guidance
Real responsibility (own decisions).
Clear goals & feedback.
Simple story and tutorial for context.
Skill tested
Math through precise wreath orders.
OBJECTIVE
Create wreaths for customers.
TESTING ROUND 1
PRESCHOOL TESTING
My team and I visited a local preschool to get a sense of how children like our concept. We used whiteboards and flower magnets to play and asked them open-ended questions about how what they liked, wished, and wondered about the game.
takeaways
satisfying clicks
The click of the magnets kept children attentive and excited.
JOY IN creating
Children took pride in the act of creating wreaths for others.
no gender bias
Both boys and girls were equally engaged.
A clearer concept
flower fraction game
Include an image of the flower shop concept.
Agency level
To test the effect of agency on learning, we opted for 3 versions of the game with varying levels of choice. The elements that change are client and bow selection at the end of completing each wreath.
bow
client
The two elements that change in each version.
MOST Agency
Customer and bow selection.
Medium Agency
Only bow selection.
Least Agency
Neither customer or bow selection.
With a clearer concept, I was able to move onto rendering in the game engine, Unity.
Early game rendition in Unity.
key changes made
hobby objects
To make customer selection a more conscious choice.
no autoplay
Manual arrows instead so the child decides their pace.
