Teach Your Monster’s collaborative innovation
How phonics game pioneers Teach Your Monster brought together different perspectives to go beyond gamification and create high quality innovation.
👋 This week, we’re looking at how bringing together different perspectives can help you innovate in the challenging space of EdTech for kids.
We’re also running a London Meetup on Tuesday (26 November). We’re lucky enough to be joined by two of the product team who have been building Oak National Academy’s amazing AI lesson planning assistant who will be talking about how they did it. If you’re in London, do come and join us. Sign up here.
“Our goal was to make something that was a real game, not just gamification,” says Antonio Gould, Executive Director of Teach Your Monster.
“Pretty much all education technology for young kids has the ‘chocolate covered broccoli problem’,” he explains. “Which is that it’s actually made in quite a boring way. But then there's a layer of ‘fun’ on top of it. You know, adding a few points here, some rewards here and maybe a character there.”
He contrasts this with Teach Your Monster’s approach. “Our hypothesis was that if we brought together leading academics with really top end game designers and production talent, we could make something that was really fun and pedagogically sound. Properly integrated together into a real game that kids came back to again and again.”
This interdisciplinary philosophy is still core to Teach Your Monster, who make the BAFTA nominated Teach Your Monster To Read and now, a range of other educational games for early years.
TYM was founded by The Usborne Foundation, set up in 2011 by the legendary UK children’s book publisher Peter Usborne MBE with a mission to use playful media to address issues from literacy to health. The foundation is run by Peter’s children, Nicola and Martin after Peter passed away in 2023 aged 85.
“People said to them, don't give money away. Make stuff yourselves,” says Antonio, about the impetus for the foundation. “And they had a hypothesis that they could make an impact in games for literacy.”
Teach Your Monster To Read is now played by 1.5 million kids every month both at home and in schools.
Antonio has taken the time to reflect on the journey of how to bring together the unique components of a small game studio, literacy and learning experts, plus social enterprise to create a successful game and then repeat this recipe for a portfolio of products.
“The idea of the company having educators and game designers at the heart as equals is the founding hypothesis behind the organisation and still is now.”
Collaborative beginnings
Antonio originally joined as a freelance digital producer. He helped bring together leading academics from Roehampton University, Angela Colvert and Alison Kelly with the game designer Jonathan Skuse and Berbank Green from Popleaf and illustrator Rich Wake, who had previously worked for Cartoon Network. They were also joined by the actor Simon Farnaby, a familiar voice from Horrible Histories, Ghosts and The Detectorists who provided narration.
“We were very intentional about them working together collaboratively,” he says. “Those game designers learned a huge amount about phonics. How it's taught, how it works, the science of it. To the point where, they really understood what it was they were trying to do. And vice versa. Our academics learned a lot about game design.”
He contrasts this with the “chuck it over the wall” approach that is typically taken. “We had lots of pitches from games companies in the early days, where they said give us the pedagogy and we’ll apply it to this off-the-shelf games engine. We absolutely didn’t want to do that.”
“Our game designers are constantly thinking about the kind of stuff that a designer from another field wouldn't necessarily be thinking about,” he says. “For example, persistence is important. The idea that you're taking a monster on an adventure that might go over the course of weeks or months. Really thinking about the story, the characters they're going to meet, the different worlds that you travel to and how to make things compelling so that kids want to come back the next day.”
The first game was launched in 2013, initially as a Flash game, with HTML, iPad and then smartphone apps coming later.
Quality differentiation
He reckons that kids deserve better from educational products. “After 13 years, I expected by this point that there would be a lot more quality games on the market. There's still not very much for this age group beyond gamified quizzes.”
I ask why he thinks this is. He believes there are two reasons that they have been able to do something that others haven’t.
“It's expensive,” he says. “Fundamentally, the market we're in is still highly immature. No one's really made a blockbuster EdTech product or game for this age group.”
“There are companies that have managed to make money out of it, but they tend to be ones that have been around for 20 years. It takes a really long time to build a brand. There's no clear, quick route to market. So in the end, you've got to have investment. And there’s very few investors who will be patient enough. We were incredibly lucky that this was a philanthropic endeavour from Peter and he really wanted Usborne to provide support, because he recognised the challenge.”
The second reason he gives is less straightforward.
“We blended the best of different fields into one organisation. That I think is quite unusual,” he says. “Our team is a mix of a scrappy startup, a small games studio and education company. And it's charity funded. I think that you need to kind of blend all those different things for something like this to work. And it's quite challenging to do that, particularly if you’re thinking very commercially. That's an important reason why we've been able to stay different in the market.”
The quality that is a result of this unusual approach is reflected in their app store ratings which are consistently above 4.5 stars.
Testing and iterating with kids
Another aspect that he thinks is different is the way they involve kids in developing the product.
“We use kids a lot in testing,” he says. “We don't tend to involve them in the design. We haven't found it tends to work because kids don't really know what they want until they see it. But we constantly test and iterate.”
“I’ve worked in a lot of organisations that sort of throw in a bit of testing right at the end almost as a box ticking exercise,” he says. “Instead, we prototype really early and start testing stuff immediately. As soon as we've made even pretty basic prototypes, we get kids to use them.”
They have a specialist who leads this research, Carla Vij. He says that these insights make a massive difference to the game play: “It might be the way in which something moves, or the way in which you select something or what happens when you get the right or the wrong. We do loads and loads of iterations and loads and loads of testing.”
He notes that the Lean model needs to be approached differently with games than software. They do a lot of testing of individual components but he says that with games it reaches a point where “the game just kind of comes together. This is something that you can’t really test for.”
This iterative approach is another example of the attention to detail that helps them differentiate on quality and take engagement to the next level.
Growing an audience and community
So given the challenges around finding an audience in this market, what was their route to market?
“We tried an absolutely enormous number of things,” he says. “One of the most successful was we talked to a lot of influential teachers in EdTech. Partly because we wanted to get them on side but mainly because we really wanted to understand what they thought of the product. So by the time we launched, we knew most of the teachers who were on Twitter. And the day we launched, they all tweeted about it.”
They continued to amplify posts by influencers like Cory Doctorow who had tweeted about the product and gradually more and more people started to tell each other about it and they began to grow.
“It’s mainly been about community management,” he says, describing their growth model. “Talking to people about it, making sure people were supported and encouraging them to recommend it to each other.”
Later, when they introduced a price for the app version, they started to run regular free periods. “These got a lot of excitement and attention for the week and got a lot of people talking about it. That helps boost things.”
Promotions like App Of The Day, also provided these little boosts, but ultimately he thinks the quality of the product is the best form of marketing. “When you have that, people will tell each other about it. And that's just the most powerful form of marketing there is. Nothing else beats it.”
After a gradual start, they began to double the number of users year-on-year, mainly through word of mouth.
Business model
They deliberately kept an open mind about whether parents or schools would be their primary market. Through experimentation, they have found that schools provide a great marketing channel and parents the revenue.
“Schools tend to use the free web version. Parents use a paid app version. Parents pay for it because they've got money and schools don't. Schools promote it to parents. And some of them pay. It's a nice virtuous circle.”
This mix, combined with the free periods, that helps attention and to make it available to the less well off, enables them to maximise their mission in a sustainable way and explore new opportunities to make an impact. “It’s gone beyond what Peter and Nicola ever expected in the amount of usage and so we’ve had to find the right commercial model to sustain it,” he says.
Longevity was also a founding principle and this has informed their approach. “Peter wanted us to exist for a long time. Making sure that we've got some sort of stability and security around money is vital. So that's our ambition. But we also want to make sure that the pricing is highly ethical and transparent.”
He believes that there are competitors in the space who employ unethical practices around pricing and how they get kids to persuade their parents to pay.
“We don't want to do that,” he says categorically. “We don't want to have advertising. We don't want to have anything that is damaging or harmful for a kid. But we don't want to cut kids out from not having it if they can't afford it. So it’s balancing all those things. This is a really good example of where blending all these different types of organisations is actually quite difficult. I'm a really big believer in social enterprise but it's not easy and it's a constant thing we think about.”
From one game to a portfolio
In 2021, they changed their name to simply Teach Your Monster, to reflect the growing family of games beyond reading. Along with Reading For Fun, the follow up to their original game, they now offer Number Skills to support maths and numeracy and Adventurous Eating, which encourages kids to eat a wider variety of food.
How did they go about repeating the magic? Much of it is about sticking to the original formula of collaboration, testing and team members immersing themselves into a project.
One area that was more challenging was the brand. “We allow the teams to have different art styles, because we felt that for some of them, they needed something quite different. For Adventurous Eating, the monsters need to be much closer to the screen, because the child needs to see their expressions of delight or disgust. But we tried to keep the general vibe across art styles.”
He notes that it’s about retaining the same underlying design principles. For example, with Teach Your Own Monster “it was very much about the kids projecting onto the monster their own anxieties or insecurities so they can feel a sense of power.”
Empowering teams
This ‘latitude’ on design was one example of where they needed to find a balance between giving teams autonomy and retaining a coherent approach.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people in different companies about where they succeeded and where they failed. I heard this repeating thing so many times: it was when they tried to do multiple things at once and they kept centralised control, that everything went wrong,” he remembers. “I really want to avoid that. But at the same time, I felt like it was a bit of a black art trying to figure out what needed to be centralised and what could be let go.”
So having dabbled in those black arts, what advice does he have to others in a similar situation? He reckons that good quality leadership in key roles is vital, along with not underestimating how hard it can be.
One key principle they have identified for what decisions should be made collaboratively and what should be left to teams is considering how hard a decision is to reverse.
“Some decisions are quite difficult to reverse or maybe they have a knock on impact,” he says. “So they are the kinds of decisions that you want to get right and be deliberate about. We try as much as possible to still be super collaborative when making those decisions. I find that teams are pretty happy with that. Teams don't tend to like making those sorts of decisions themselves.”
If you can identify these, then you can give teams lots of autonomy on other decisions). He says that 80-90% of the decisions are left to the team, “because fundamentally, the people who are closest to the product are the ones who know what's going to be best for users.”
Initiatives as well as objectives
They set a focus for the next two or three years. Then they agree on a set of Initiatives - agile projects - for the next six months.
This is done in collaboration with the team and their board. These include things like what games they are going to build and marketing and monetisation projects. He says that the addition of the Initiatives concept has been the key to autonomy.
“We’ve used an objective-based model for a while, but we really needed a way, not just for talking about what our goals were but for coming together and talking about the things we were doing to make progress towards them.”
He elaborates: “We didn't want to tell teams how they should run an initiative. Generally, people are the best placed to do that themselves. But we did need to be clearer about things like the ‘why’. Are we doing this now or later? How much resource are we going to put in?”
These are the kinds of explicit decisions that need to be made collaboratively that then enable the team to be autonomous. “We found those conversations were a bit too ad-hoc until we introduced the Initiatives model. It really now is the central plank of our decision making process.”
To make sure that these initiatives are on track, they run a monthly ‘Monster Council’ attended by their Product Managers, Creative, Tech and Operations leads, plus Antonio. “We review how the initiatives are going. What's the data looking like? Do we need to course correct? If we put all these things together, are they likely to get us to where we wanted to get to?”
He reflects on how they have improved on their company “operating system”.
“Autonomy can only really work if you have quite a solid, structured outer shell within which people can be highly autonomous,” he says. “There have been periods in the past where the shell hasn't been right. It's either been too prescriptive and people have ended up being limited or working under unreasonable constraints. Or it's been too loose, and it's ended up kind of going off in the wrong direction.
“This is one of the hardest things to get right about running a creative organisation,” he says. “But you have to allow people to make those decisions because they just know their subject. There's no way that I can know everything about numeracy and phonics and literacy, and there's no way that I want to tell everybody exactly how to do their jobs.”
This means instead you have to spend time getting the decision making structure right. “These things can sound really esoteric and like you're dancing on the head of a pin. But they're everything” he says. He reckons that they’re really good at this now. “We've practised it a lot and we're really getting quite good at this stuff.”
Summary
We reflect back on the conversation and what others can learn from their journey.
Combine different perspectives to create innovation. For Teach Your Monster their strengths came from fusing a game studio, education experts, and social enterprise.
Create a clear decision making framework to give experts autonomy. Go beyond setting objectives and design initiatives with explicit guardrails.
Make hard to reverse decisions collaboratively. Give autonomy over the rest.
Invest in quality. It will be a differentiator and your best marketing.
Be user-centred. Feedback and support will help you deliver a better product.
Think creatively about how the business model supports the mission. For Teach Your Monster, schools are a marketing channel and parents pay to make it sustainable.
“The most interesting organisations, the ones that will have lasting impact are the ones that succeed in bringing the approaches of different industries into one hybrid organisation. That’s where the real innovation happens,” he says. “But also that is really hard, because you're pulling together people who are from different cultures that have really different DNAs. If I think about our struggles, they have often been to do with that. But then when I think about our greatest successes, it’s also because of that struggle.”
This case study will feature in my upcoming programme on Finding Product-Market Fit in EdTech, starting in January.