Hello, Kickstarters!

We wish to thank you for your gratefulness and trust in our work. While we did not achieve our crowdfunding goals, we were had some really interesting people with similar goals contacting us. Tinkido continues development and we look towards our next phase of funding.

To help, connect and synergize with other idealistic Estonians working in the same field, we’ve split the organization to create an additional, non-profit organization for other early childhood digital education projects (MTÜ E-Aabits).

Tinkido continues to cooperate with several education organizations, including 3D-graphics programme in Tartu Art School , University of Tartu, and Tallinn University Institute of Educational Sciences. There’s still a lot of good little things that can be done until we find ourselves a budget.

Thank you, and may you have an awesome new year!

Sincerely, the Tinkido team

Educational games developer TiNKiDO launches funding campaign to build modern ePrimer game-worlds for kids

After firstly releasing prototypes for the Grouping and Counting games in Google Play Store, TiNKiDO a volunteer based ePrimer project has launched a funding campaign on crowdfunding platform www.kickstarter.com.

As a strategic charitable enterprise they have set a goal to build a magical virtual playworld where children can safely travel around, explore and play smart games. The games are designed to teach knowledge, mental and social skills. The virtual learning environment will also have parental accounts that can be used oversee children’s mental development, offer guidance and help where necessary, while also providing learning statistics for more conscious educational choices in the future.


Developing team of the prototypes consisted of Educational Scientists and Researchers, Game Designers, Artists, Programmers etc. From the first steps of the project, testing on children aged 2 to 7 has been an important aspect for the team, mixed with 3-day developing marathons called “GameJams”, where big part of their game development is done.The developers first release, for which the funding has been started, is going to be a beautiful world of water, full of games that allow kids to effortlessly learn prime skills and knowledge of mathematics, such as numbers and counting. TiNKiDO is planning on building 5 virtual playworlds with emphasis on different educational aspects. The first sketches of the worlds, characters and full information about TiNKiDO is available here.

The game continues

TiNKiDO GameJam

Summer vacation is over and the the team is back at work. For a proper kick off, we came together for a GameJam to pitch new ideas and work on our Alphabetical knowledge game.

There was also some mention about bringing math games to Android and iOs platforms, stay tuned :)

An important aspect of Tinkido is the Learning Managment System (LMS) which helps to get a better understanting of how the child is evolving. For that we continue to work with scientists, education workers and kindergardens.

Rest of us will continue working on the Kickstarter project which will launch early next month.

How the game is made.

We thought that we should take a moment to let you know what exactly makes our game educational.

There are a lot of games that are meant for little children and no doubt that they have a lot of qood qualities. But we wanted to be sure that our game is really useful.

So for us, the process of game development looks something like this:

• First, we have an idea about what should be the focus of the game and for witch age group it is meant. Our game designers have a long discussion with educational scientists from two universities and we discuss how the certain age group should be approached. This idea is then written into a technical document for which our artists add the first sketches of objects and art.
• Then the game development starts. We have the designs and models made at the same time as the code is being written. Most of our IT work is done over sessions we call GameJams. These are usually a 3 day events over weekends where everyone gets together, works and help each other. This is needed as a lot of us has a day-job and we're developing Tinkido on our free time.
• Whenever we finish a new part of the game or some new features we are going back to the scientists. They give us their notes and then the developers make improvments. This phase is usually repeated a lot. Just to make sure that everything works and children really learn something from the game (and this is also the reason why it's very hard for us to predict, how long game development is going to take. We decided early that we would rather fail the deadline then fail the children)
• And when everything seems fine to the scientists and developers, the game is tested by scientists on children from different kindergardens.
• When this is done, we'll add the features to the free alpha build on our webpage.

So, this is it. I hope this helps you understand our mechanics a little better. Of course, it's not quite that easy, but we have a lot of fun doing it.

It is also important to understand, that if the  game is finished and public, we are still going to improve and add features (on the same method as described above) for as long as we have good ideas.

Concept art: Waterworld

Today we'll show you some upgraded artwork from our first game and the waterworld it features


Hope you like them:)

Progress update: February

Here's a little update on what we've been doing lately:

First of all, we have finally translated our homepage to English, so you can read all about the game in here: http://www.tinkido.com/

Game development

The prototype of the game has been developed further and you can try it out here: http://e-aabits.ee/alpha/

Currently we are trying out some new activities to offer children in our game's waterworld.. Our main focus is currently on fish and moving them in our mathematical game.
In addition to the main educational games we want to develop some small and entertaining minigames. Like the Puzzle Game you can see in the demo.

We are now using the latest version of Linux (4.0.1) that, in addition to offering the latest tools, allows us to compliment the game for Linux platforms.

In February we had two GameJam weekends: a 2 day periods for brainstorming and game development. The main focus of these events was developing the Sets game and the Addition and Subtraction game.


The Team

Our lead developer Veljo Hagu (The veteran and project manager of Playtech) took over the responsibilities of technical project management from Kristjan Mustkivi. Kristjan recently had a baby of his own but he will return to the project once his family has settled into their new life.

The team has also grown. We are happy to welcome Alan Sigus and Mark Tehver (both from Playtech), Keijo Kraus (Fanchinima, 3D Tech R&D ) and Edgar Juhkov (http://www.juhkov.com/).

We'll keep you updated on our latest news so don't go anywhere!:)