Project Overview

Imagine that a child could learn the entire Encyclopedia of Life--including how nature designs and solves problems around structure, pattern and color--without it ever feeling like school.

Ani-gram-it is a beautifully designed board game that teaches children the ins and outs of the animal kingdom through play. Children are challenged to “build” animals using intuitive building blocks of anatomical information. Each play leads to new discoveries about how animals are made -- and reinforces how they are classified in the natural world.

Children first comprehend by seeing, and we have spared no detail to make our board game the most visually stunning one on the market, educational or otherwise. The game features a bold color scheme utilizing deep blacks and hi-resolution photography, 100 colorful chit board tiles, and matte laminated everything. Ani-gram-it even has a sister app, called FERRET, to provide a complementary digital experience.

Ani-gram-it mimics and celebrates the great beauty of the natural world… and is as much an objet d'art as a revolutionary educational tool.

Organisation

na2ure

Team

Vijal Parikh Co-Counder

Project Brief

Ani-gram-it is a crossword-style board game that teaches children the ins and outs of the animal kingdom through play.

The object of Ani-gram-it is to “build” animals using a classification system representing five categories of animal features: move, see/hear/feel, eat, skin and inside. Each tile is double-sided, featuring the name of a body part on one side and a vivid color photograph depicting that body part on the other. Children either build new animals on each turn or expand on ones that have already been played. Each turn prompts new discussions and discoveries - until they use up all the tiles and win!

As they play, children will not only build a comprehensive knowledge of biology, but develop a deep, dynamic appreciation for the beauty and creativity of the natural world. This is the future of science education.

Project Innovation/Need

We have found a way to marry information design and pattern recognition, pioneering an entirely new category of game. Ani-gram-it is both scientifically accurate and high design, making it coffee table worthy and a classroom necessity. Paired with her sister app FERRET, Ani-gram-it offers a unique, transmedia experience which is truly the future of gamified learning.

Top industry experts in science, education, design, games and toys agree that this is a radically new, smart, and elegant way to learn. From HASBRO, Chicago Toy Fair and ThinkFun, to Bank Street School, The Chapin School, to PhDs at Princeton, Yale and Columbia to RISD’s STEM to STEAM office, to Biomimicry 3.8 and the VC’s behind Sphero, LittleBits and Makerbot, excitement is building around Ani-gram-it and FERRET.

There’s nothing like this on the market, and these are just our first products launching now in Spring 2014. Nature learning is finally as beautiful and intelligent as Nature herself.

Design Challenge

Our greatest challenge in creating Ani-gram-it was to demonstrate that Nature is the ultimate designer. Design is about creating an object for a specific function, and Nature has done this for millions of years. Without fail. The trial-and-error genius of evolution ensures that each organism achieves perfect functionality--or dies.

We wanted children to learn those principles of Nature through play, and we wanted to do it in a way that mirrored the beauty and wonder of Nature herself.

And was FUN.

Thankfully, we had a RISD artist and a Cornell neurobiologist on the case, who created a game that reinforced how Nature’s structures, color patterns, and textures work together to create animals. In a game that looks like it belongs in a museum.

Ani-gram-it marries information design and visual learning around animal anatomy, activated in a game format.

There’s never been a consumer facing product that did that… until now.

Effectiveness

The user experience with Ani-gram-it is all about learning through play.

Both the game board and tiles are reversible, in order to play with either pictures or words. With 100 pictures and 23 words, we've been able to drop the player's age to very early reader (or even pre-reader), allowing the littlest of kids to build animals alongside their parents. In the same game.

The gameplay mirrors basic crossword game format... but adds a twist in that players are building animals instead of words. Once players recognize that mechanic, gameplay takes off and the player who uses up all their tiles first wins!

Each turn prompts new questions -- and surprises -- from the players. Adding tiles like "venom" to a platypus, or "beak" to an octopus, prompt lots of questions (and frantic Googling), and the resulting discussions are how all the players learn. Together.

Ani-gram-it is a reverse mirror of our app, FERRET: Ani-gram-it is about building any animal from scratch, while FERRET is about deconstructing a chosen animal. FERRET is single user (or guided teacher play). Ani-gram-it is friendly for multiple players. Both are FUN. Enjoy!