Pedro Tamburro is a product designer & design engineer crafting digital products end to end.
●Rio de Janeiro, BR
●Your time
Pedro Tamburro is a product designer & design engineer crafting digital products end to end.
Educational game where children build animal names, learn fun facts and practice literacy skills.
Overview
The child sees an animal illustration and must build its name by dragging letters into the correct spaces. Each correct answer reveals a fun fact about the animal. Difficulty scales progressively: longer words, time limits, and distractor letters. Targets literacy, motor coordination, and natural sciences.
Details
In motion
Around 6% of Brazilian children aged 6 to 14 can neither read nor write, and educational apps tend to lose children's attention by being repetitive.
Game Designer & AI Engineer, solo: mechanics, code and curation of the animal database with the Claude API.
A game live in one day, where spelling the animal's name unlocks a real fact about it. The reward is information, not points or leaderboards.
Brazil has one of the largest literacy deficits in Latin America: according to IBGE, around 6% of children aged 6 to 14 cannot read or write, and INEP studies show only 53% of 3rd-grade students reach adequate reading levels. The issue isn't just school access, it's engagement. Existing educational apps are often repetitive and quickly lose children's attention. The hypothesis: combining animals, fun facts, and game mechanics creates a learning loop with intrinsic rewards, where the child wants to continue not for points, but because the next fact is genuinely interesting.
The child sees an animal illustration and builds its name by dragging letters into the correct slots. A correct answer immediately unlocks a fun fact about that animal, a micro-moment of discovery that rewards effort with real knowledge. Difficulty scales across three levels: easy (short words, no timer), medium (longer words, distractor letters), and hard (time pressure, complex words). Progression is gated by level, encouraging mastery before moving on. The star rating system per round creates a natural replay objective: finishing with a perfect score.
The game was built in 1 day using Claude as pair programmer at every stage: game structure, drag-and-drop logic, level progression system, and animal database with real fun facts. The animal database was generated and curated using the Claude API, ensuring facts were accurate, age-appropriate, and varied enough to maintain interest across rounds.
The key learning was about the power of context in children's education. Isolated letters are abstract for children; letters that form 'elephant' and reveal it weighs 6 tons are concrete, memorable, and tied to an emotional experience. The drag-and-drop mechanic with immediate feedback, combined with the fun fact as reward, created a loop that maintained engagement without needing points or leaderboards. The game works because the reward is information, not artificial gamification.
