A children's educational game teaching number bonds through a magical cave adventure. Built for SplashLearn — live for Grade 2–3 learners worldwide.
He hears strange voices echoing from a cave and ventures inside — discovering figures engraved in stone. A puzzle waiting to be solved.
The player must fill numbered stone slots with Cuisenaire rods — placing the right combinations to unlock what's hidden inside the rock.
Solve the puzzle correctly and the figure animates to life. Correct math equals a magical, immediate result — visceral and delightful.
A number bond is a simple addition of two numbers that sum to a given total. Using them, children can instantly derive answers without formal calculation — and the same concept bridges directly into subtraction fluency.
The game teaches through spatial reasoning — by physically placing rods to fill a slot, children experience the additive relationship between parts and wholes. Embodied, not memorised.
Nine distinct Cuisenaire rod lengths are always visible at the bottom. Each represents a number — the child's palette for building solutions.
Each puzzle presents numbered slots carved in stone. The player fills each slot with rods that add up to the target number exactly.
No single correct answer. A "9" slot accepts one 9-rod, or 6+3, or 4+5. Children discover equivalence naturally through exploration.
Players can freely add and remove rods until confident. No fear of failure — just experimentation. Key to deep learning.
From the initial concept through to final game testing, I owned the complete game design pipeline.
Into the Jungle was one of 20+ games I designed at SplashLearn. But the work went well beyond individual games.
As a founding member of the design team, I collaborated directly with the co-founders to shape the product vision of what became a multi-billion dollar edtech platform for children's math and English learning.
I established the game design team from the ground up — hiring and training junior designers, and putting in place standardised processes that made the team's output consistent and scalable.
I led user testing sessions directly with children, and developed creative research methodologies that brought genuine, in-depth feedback into the design process — not just surface-level reactions.
I defined the end-to-end process — ideation, design, development handoff, and feedback collection — and built a streamlined system that ensured actionable insights made it into every final product.