Rigby Education

For 70 years, Rigby—now an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—has provided innovative and effective learning solutions for primary education that meet the needs of individual students. In 2002, they turned to Mightybytes to push their product line into the digital realm with Pebble Soup, one of their most popular brands. We created a set of twelve bilingual CD-ROM-based software titles that ran on Macs and PCs with the purpose of helping kids ages five to eight improve reading and comprehension skills.

OUR APPROACH

Since all twelve titles were based on a similar template-driven structure, extensive wireframing and information architecture exercises occupied the bulk of the front-end project work in this year and a half long project. We worked with the client to build content inventory spreadsheets and detailed scripts that outlined all content elements and interactivity on every screen of each title in both English and Spanish. Building a structure that could accommodate all twelve titles proved an interesting information architecture challenge. In the end, the menu system for all twelve titles featured the following items:

• Read, where a story is simply read aloud to the user with no interactivity.
• Read and Click, where users can interact with various story elements and trigger interactive animations.
• Play, where users can play an interactive game based on story content.
• Learn, where users answer comprehension questions about the story.

IMPLEMENTATION

Once we moved into production, project managers, developers, and animators split into teams to bring first the general template and navigation structure and then each individual title to life. Given the target age group, interface content was based on simple, large buttons, bright colors, hover states with audio prompts, and artwork from the existing printed books. Each of the four menu sections mentioned above are introduced by a 2D character animated in Flash. These characters also comprised the actual menu items as well and are featured throughout each title in various places. Pages from each book—typically between twelve and twenty per title—come to life in the ‘Read and Click’ section with interactive audio playback and hundreds of unique animations. Games were built on four different game play templates and included mazes, puzzles, and other fun activities. Comprehension exercises included a variety of concentration-based memory activities as well as quizzes that polled users on various elements in a story.

Since each title offered identical content in English and Spanish, testing across platforms was particularly challenging, as functionality bugs had to be tracked twice. Detailed testing matrixes and bug tracking processes were implemented to keep track of fixes and revisions in the alpha, beta, release candidate, and final files. Installers for Mac and PC users were created using InstallVise software. Upon completion, the finished titles presented a fun, engaging, and seamless user experience that on the back-end consisted of hundreds of audio files, dozens of Flash and Director files, and thousands upon thousands of keyframes.

THE RETURN

The Pebble Soup series sold very well for Harcourt Publishing and after merging with Houghton-Mifflin (another Mightybytes client), they continue to develop digital products for the K-12 education market. For Mightybytes, the experience was invaluable for gaining expertise in executing very large, long-term software and interactive media development projects.