Lightspan Products
Innovative educational Sony PlayStation® and Internet products using stories, characters, and games to emotionally engage and motivate children to learn.
What
K-8 Language arts, reading, and mathematics curriculum-based software and online programs designed to bridge the gap between schools and homes and deliver gains in student achievement.
Games provide a goal for learning and encourage students to fully master content as they progress through each level, while stories and characters pull students into a world where learning has meaning and purpose.
Title
Vice President, Curriculum and Product Design (Lightspan, Inc.)
Team
Direct reports: Instructional Design Managers, Instructional Designers, Curriculum Experts, Content Writers
Worked closely with: Production Studio (art, animation, audio), Engineering, Quality Assurance
Role
Overall responsibility for product and curriculum design.
For Five Lightspan Achieve Now product lines:
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Created design concepts and led design sessions
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Designed educational, interactive games
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Guided the curriculum design (worked with SMEs)
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Designed characters (worked with animators and artists)
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Directed research, playtesting, and pilot testing throughout the design and development cycle
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Enforced platform guidelines
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Wrote scripts for animated story segments, game dialog, and song lyrics
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Directed dialog recording sessions
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Wrote children's stories
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Reviewed and approved all design documentation, curriculum content, graphics, animation, audio, prototypes, functional iterations, and gold masters
For all product lines:
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Directed high-level design and product vision
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Managed curriculum and product design/development
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Created the documentation system
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Led a team of 22 professionals: instructional design and curriculum managers, instructional designers, and content writers
For the Lightspan Achieve Now subscription website:
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Provided UX/UI design input and oversight
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Wrote copy and curriculum-based content
A choose-your-own-adventure-style interactive story about a young girl named Adelita and her bear friend Bo that addresses K-2 reading/language arts objectives. In this this special twist on traditional tall tales, students select the actions and the settings. For example, they may have Adelita and Bo go sledding in Colorado, or send them to California for something to eat.
Students also select which version of the story they want to read and watch:
Small: Adelita is the size of average folks.
Medium: Adelita is as tall as the tallest tree.
Tall Tale: Adelita is as tall as the tallest mountain.
Role: design leader and story author
Sample Location: Oregon
Liquid Books: Far-Fetched Frontier Tales
Tall Tale
Medium
Small
Liquid Books: The Wandering Path
In The Wandering Path, students explore three tales of virtue set in ancient China. Students assist the inhabitants of a small village with the great honor of choosing the name for their bridge. Three villagers have proposed names inspired by stories they have read. After reading each story, students select a name and attend the grand celebration.
Role: design leader, writer (animation scripts and character dialog), and author of "The Secret Ingredient" and "Little Liu"
Adventure Intro
Meet a Villager and Read "Little Liu"
Meet a Villager and
Read "The Secret Ingredient"
Villager Proposes a Name
Villager Proposes a Name
Choose a Name
and Celebrate
K-95
Ladies and gentleman, meet the coolest canine rock band around—K9.5! Throughout their many travels en route to concerts, recording sessions, and live webcasts—from The Howlywood Bowl to The Collieseum—the members of of K9.5 inspire students to play along. Throughout the series of five adventures, students grades 3-4 master critical reading/language arts objectives.
Role: design leader (games and character development) and writer (animation scripts, song lyrics, character dialog, character descriptions for the Teacher's Guides)
Challenge: motivate students to master reading/language arts objectives
My Solutions:
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Design games that are a highly contextualized part of the story
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Integrate reading/language arts skills directly into the gameplay
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Use characters to model the use of reading/language arts skills
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Design characters with a wide range of personalities
Adventure 1—Live in Airedale
Ella and Gershwyn are travelling by hot-air balloon to meet the rest of the band for a big performance at Airedale Stadium when they suddenly hit a wind tunnel and lose all of the band instruments! Students help Ella and Gershwyn retrieve the nine lost instruments. After completing all of the games, students watch K9.5 perform their hit song, "We Are the Dogs."
Content: syllables, nouns and adjectives, verb forms
The Swamp
The Canyon
Found Instrument
Adventure Intro
Adventure Finale
Adventure Intro
Adventure 5—The Howlywood Premiere
K9.5 is in search of exciting video footage, 3-D effects, and exotic sound samples for their new music video. Students travel the globe with the band and help mix the video just in time for the big Howylwood premiere!
Content: parts of speech, synonyms, simple and compound predicates and sentences, topic sentences, heteronyms and homonyms, commonly confused words, analogies to compare and contrast ideas
Teacher Guide Content
Lightspan Achieve Now Teacher's Guides include character descriptions and song lyrics, along with curriculum-based classroom activities and black-line masters to send home for the whole family to use.
Samples of my work from Adventure 5—The Howlywood Premiere:
Click to Zoom!
In the Press
"In Level 1, a child needs to master multiplication tables. A child will keep playing the first level until they've completely mastered it," says Lightspan's Liz Herrick.
"There's no more powerful form of learning — to take what you've learned and apply it to the next level of the game. This is not just sugar-coated broccoli."
Learning Via Video Games
USA Today/Tech
"All our games are designed for replayability, to have kids play them over and over again," said Liz Herrick, vice president of curriculum and product design at Lightspan."
"Teachers want kids repeating the content until it becomes totally internalized and automatic for them, so that's one benefit of the game," she said. All the games are tied directly to a school's curriculum."