PBS Kids is the children’s brand of the Public Broadcasting Service of the United States. They are responsible for output of the children’s TV programmes and have also developed up to 500 online learning games focused at children learning through narratives around their TV show characters.

PBS Kids contacted Goodboy Digital to help develop the user interface for their new centralised tablet and mobile Games Portal on Android and iOS. The Games Portal would gradually transition existing online games onto a new Game development framework that integrated into their new learning analytics platform and parental control panel.

We developed an Apache Cordova driven iOS and Android application allowing playback of games and delivery of learning analytics data to their backend system. We worked extensively with their team in Washington DC and performed a period of day-to-day adjustments to the user interface based on user testing feedback. The application featured a ‘springy’ physics based WebGL and Pixi.js user interface with HTML overlays at near-native performance and it has received 5 million+ downloads.