Since then I've been on a journey in the videogame industry from managing the world's best gaming teams, to operating events around the world and consulting for governments and global brands. I was even invited to No.10 Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister of the UK because I was consulting about child safety online back in 2008/9.
But I reached a point where I wasn't enjoying it anymore.
My partner is a school teacher and at home we were always talking about her class (she teaches 8-9 year olds), their interests and the lessons she had done during the day. We also talked about the planning she did for lessons and there was a time when she desperately needed to create a lesson plan for the next day. The math topic was perimeter.
I knew her class were all interested in the videogame "Among Us" so I suggested creating a lesson plan about the game. Among Us is a game where you and other players complete tasks in different rooms on a spaceship and other locations. 30 minutes later we had a lesson plan asking the students to design new rooms in the spaceship and calculate the perimeter of the rooms.
The next day I got a WhatsApp message from my partner about the math lesson and it simply said – “they love this Among Us stuff”. It even had one of those emojis with the monkey and the hands over the eyes.
I then helped her create plans for other math lessons based on games like Minecraft, and created practice sheets and tested them with a handful of parents. Comments from the parents all focused on how their children were interested in the practice sheets because they recognized the link to videogames.
That's when I knew I could use my experience in the videogame industry to create learning resources and help parents like you.
Philip Wride