Yibu

Global trends indicate that children are spending more time playing indoors due to parents’ concerns over safety. When inside the home, the majority of play is spent sitting alone, in front of a digital screen. Parents are investing heavily in new ways to ensure their children succeed – The market for “edugames” will top $2.3billon USD by 2017.

frog designed Yibu to transform the indoor play experience. The goal: educate children about their environment and encourage them to be more active by posing real-world challenges to solve.
Yibu creates an educational play ecosystem by combining the digital world and the physical world. While most apps and digital games explain the world through a screen only, whilst the child passively watches. Yibu uses the digital screen as one part of a multi-dimensional adventure activity. Pushing them to explore and play with the world around them.

These sensors – designed in harmony with beautifully crafted wooden toys – interact with light, sound, direction, movement, and temperature. The corresponding tablet app functions as a window into the game world, which is influenced by the context of play, generating new challenges as the game moves along. To strengthen the connection between the game and the player’s reality, Yibu scrapes environmental data based on the child’s location. For example, if it rains outside it can rain in the game. Or if air or water quality is poor, the game can respond to these situations.

frog designed Yibu [pronounced ee-boo, meaning “first step” in Mandarin] to be an open platform, with the intent for game developers to create more games by referencing the sensors and contextual api’s in their code.