MEB primary education — Unity game line
We developed educational digital content and games for the Ministry of National Education’s Basic Education Department. All design, coding, models and animations were produced by AJANSNET.
The context.
A set of browser-based educational games for the Directorate General of Primary Education. The weight is on mathematics: geometry, fractions, numbers and operations, ratio and proportion, measurement and data handling. At the edges of the set there are games that reach into science, geography and language.
The brief was not one game but a line of them: games for different learning outcomes at the same school stage, openable one after another in the same lesson. A game built for one topic had to speak the same language as the game built for the next.
The problem.
Producing a single game and producing a set are not the same job. Some titles here are a one-screen exercise, others a multi-scene structure with an area to explore — yet the pupil opens all of them in the same lesson, back to back. A difference in complexity could not be allowed to become a difference in interface.
The second constraint was the delivery format. The games had to run in the browser, with nothing to install, on the hardware a school already has; both the art direction and the compiled output had to stay inside that limit.
The scope.
- Design, coding, model and animation production for educational digital content
- Digital content development
- Design and visual production
- Coding and interaction development
- Model production
- Animation production
- Game development
- Educational mechanics designed from the learning outcome towards the play
- Vector illustration and scene art production
- Shared interface kit and design system
- Development in Unity with C# game code
- A separate “How to Play” screen per game
- WebGL builds for the browser
- Delivery including source code and the project repository
The approach.
Nearly every game in the set carries the same scene backbone: a main screen, a how-to-play screen and the play scene. Some projects add a loading scene, some a stage scene — but the skeleton is the same, and a new game starts from it rather than from an empty project. What it buys is consistency more than speed — the pupil does not relearn the interface on the second game.
Play was derived from the learning outcome; the outcome was not fitted over the play afterwards. In the compass game the question on screen is whether you can draw a circle with a radius of 2.5 centimetres, and the pupil actually uses the compass. The result screen shows the circle that was drawn and the progress made; the measurement outcome was not reduced to a multiple-choice question.
Nearly every game carries its own “How to Play” screen. This is where the production discipline is most visible: the teacher does not have to explain the game in class, the game explains itself.
The design.
Most of the set shares one button kit: start, check, yes, no, next, how to play. The calm and the emphasised state of each button come from the same folder, and in the projects that share the kit that folder sits under the same name. The collage below is not one game’s screen but that shared part itself.
What stands here is therefore a game platform rather than a game collection. The art direction changes from title to title — a kitchen, a workshop, an area to explore — but what the pupil touches does not.
The art direction is vector-based, flat-coloured and highly saturated. That is a legibility decision for the primary stage: fine gradations disappear in an image projected in a classroom, flat colour holds.
Technology.
The scale.
160
educational digital content items — production scope
41
Unity project repositories in the archive
208
Unity scenes in the archive
The delivery.
What was delivered was not a compiled game. What the institution received was the projects themselves: scenes, prefabs, C# scripts, project settings and the package manifest — everything needed to rebuild and change the games.
The source assets shipped at production resolution too. The kitchen scene below is not a screenshot but the background art layer of that scene — the institution holds the file that produces the image, not just the image.
This is a deliberate transfer of ownership. A delivery format that creates dependency serves the supplier in the short run; what is right for a public buyer is to be able to keep the work it paid for.
The experience.
The pupil opens the game in the browser and works through the topic by playing it. In the cake game the ingredient measure is tracked on a fraction card: the corner of the screen shows how much of the flour has gone in, and the fraction arrives as part of the recipe rather than as a question.
In the tiling game the pupil lays the floor tile by tile and counts the area; as the grid fills, the result comes out on its own. The two tiling frames below are two moments of the same game: a completed measurement and a partly laid floor.
The shared structure shows at the end of a round as well: the finished work stays on screen and the progress bar fills, so the pupil can see how far they got.
