The Washgroves Learning Game

Inspiration

The Washgroves Learning Game began with a personal goal: helping my grandchildren learn in a way that felt playful, encouraging, and enjoyable. As the idea developed, I realized it could reach beyond my own family and support many other children as they build important early skills. That realization shaped the game into an age-based learning experience designed to grow with children, strengthen their confidence, and help families and educators make learning feel like a rewarding adventure.

What It Does

The Washgroves Learning Game is a voice-guided educational adventure designed to grow with children through age-based learning stages. The current Fire TV build focuses on Stage One for ages 3–5, using colorful visual activities, friendly encouragement, and puzzle rewards to help children practice early skills such as colors, letters, sounds, matching, and recognition. Tricia, a member of the Washgroves family, guides children through the activities so they can learn with minimal reading or adult assistance. The Fire TV version replaces touchscreen actions with clear remote-control navigation, visible focus highlighting, and simple selections designed for young players.

How We Built It

The original learning game was created in GDevelop using event-based game logic, custom artwork, voice guidance, and puzzle activities. For the hackathon, we created a separate Fire TV version so the existing Apple, Google Play, and Fire tablet projects would remain unchanged.

We exported the Fire TV version as an Android APK for Fire OS and redesigned the experience for a television screen. Touch controls were replaced with directional-pad navigation, the center Select button, and consistent Back-button behavior. We added clear focus highlighting, adjusted layouts for television safe areas and readability, and adapted activities so children can complete them with a remote instead of tapping or dragging.

We tested the build on a physical Fire TV and used Amazon Appstore Quality Central to check installation, launch behavior, compatibility, and performance across additional Fire TV devices. Each issue found during testing was addressed in the isolated Fire TV build and retested without affecting the mobile or tablet versions.

Challenges We Faced

The biggest challenge was translating a touchscreen learning game into an experience that a young child could control with a Fire TV remote. Activities originally designed around tapping and dragging needed new selection and placement methods, along with strong visual focus indicators so children could always see where they were on the screen.

We also had to adapt portrait-oriented layouts and artwork for a wide television display, keep important content inside television safe areas, make text readable from across a room, and ensure the Back button returned children to the correct screen instead of unexpectedly closing the app. Performance testing uncovered timing and responsiveness issues that were less noticeable on mobile devices, requiring repeated optimization and real-device testing.

Finally, we kept every Fire TV change inside a separate project so solving television-specific problems would not affect the approved Apple, Google Play, or Fire tablet builds.

What We Learned

We learned that bringing a learning game to Fire TV requires more than exporting the mobile version to a different device. Television play needs its own interaction design, with simple choices, predictable remote behavior, strong focus feedback, readable layouts, and audio guidance that works from across the room.

Testing also showed the importance of using both a physical Fire TV and Amazon’s automated tools. Real-device play revealed how the game actually felt with a remote, while Appstore Quality Central helped identify compatibility and performance differences across Fire TV models. Most importantly, we learned that careful isolation, frequent testing, and small verified improvements made it possible to adapt the game without putting the existing mobile and tablet versions at risk.

What's Next

Our immediate goal is to complete the remaining Stage One polish, continue testing with families and educators, and prepare the Fire TV version for an eventual Amazon Appstore release. Feedback from young players, parents, and teachers will guide improvements to tutorials, pacing, accessibility, and remote-control usability.

The larger vision is for the Washgroves Learning Game to grow with children through additional age-based stages. Future work will include expanding the learning activities, optimizing audio and artwork to keep downloads manageable, and exploring optional stage downloads so families can add the content that best fits their children. We also plan to continue improving the Apple, Google Play, Fire tablet, and Fire TV editions as separate builds that share the same educational foundation.

Built With

• amazon
• android
• appstore
• educational
• fire
• game
• gdevelop
• html5
• javascript
• tv