Creative Critters
Creative Critters is an interactive children’s site targeting ages 5-9. Where you play games (directed towards learning) to earn coins to spend on new critters, outfits, or other items. The main purpose of Creative Critters is to be a go-to site for the computer lab at school. It is engaging for children and will hopefully inspire them to learn.
Check out Creative Critters.
Why Creative Critters?
Creative Critters was a project that I wanted to create because when I was a young child in school, I really enjoyed playing learning-based games on the computer. I also enjoyed playing Neo Pets. So I figured I would try to merge the two things to create Creative Critters. Creative Critters is built to be played on desktop computers.
How I Created Creative Critters
I built Creative Critters using HTML/CSS and vanilla JavaScript. I used SCSS for my main CSS and I didn’t use any JavaScript libraries. Some future updates to the project include an SQL database with login/signup credentials and have the database store user information. However, instead I just used LocalStorage as I did not have enough time to create and link an actual database to the project. I will be wanting to continue working on a similar project to Creative Critters.
The Games!
I built two games for Creative Critters. The first game is a spelling game.
For this game, you have to spell whatever word the picture is showing. This was built similarly to how you would make Wordle, except I added an image of whatever word the answer is. So the child will know that it is a 5-letter word, they now just have to figure out what the word is and try to spell it properly.
The second game is a memory game.
The memory game is a basic tile-flipping game to match the images beneath. This game is quite a simple game that tracks the number of moves and how long it takes the child to complete the game.
The Shop and Items
The shop was the first thing I built. It’s a dynamic shop that populates with the currently available items. Once an item is purchased it displays an “Owned” tag instead of the button. Once the shop was working, I built the “My Items” page. This page can be thought of as the wardrobe area for the critter. It has dynamic sliders for displaying the items that are owned. The equipped item’s display with a “Using” tag so that the child knows that it is already equipped.
Creative Critters Overview
I had a lot of fun building this site and I intend to continue building a version of this site for children as a side project. I will use audio and more animation when buttons are hit. I want to create an online space that young children can enjoy but will still get positive learning experiences from playing.
Time spent on a screen for young children has always been a popular topic. There is a lot to be said about how too much screen time can be damaging to a child, especially when it comes to their creativity and patience. However, I think it’s important for children to build a good relationship with technology starting from a young age. My reasoning behind this is simple, technology is becoming a key part of everything we do from work to grocery shopping to even exercise. So if a child has no access to technology they may fall behind later in life. So I think the limited amount of time they do spend at a young age with technology should be optimized to give them a positive and fun learning experience.
