DUCC Project Case Study
American University Educational Programming
A multi-platform educational ecosystem for teaching digital literacy to children.
4x Animated Educational Videos
2x Interactive Learning Games
1x Custom Website + Copy
Various Static Learning Assets
Challenge: Make Complex Topics Accessible to Young Audiences
DUCC was created by a team of undergraduate students at American University as a way to pre-prevent online radicalization by teaching critical thinking at an early age. Their pilot program required four online lesson plans, an animated video and some additional design work.
When the DUCC team approached us with their mission (and mascot) we were, of course, in. But besides the task of developing and designing the actual content, connecting with their target audience presented a unique challenge. Kindergarten through 5th grade is a wide age range. And within that range comes different levels of appropriateness when it comes to online content, safety, and misinformation.
How did we ensure our content mix felt creatively cohesive, while properly engaging each grade of students?
Solution: A Multi-Platform Educational Experience
With a high-level brief provided, and some format specifics around the final deliverables, our team dove right in. First, we reviewed each age group to analyze which content experience would be best for their age and landed on videos for the younger folks and games for the older ones. The website that housed all of this information also had to be easily accessible by educators and parents.
After doing our research—and having some internal conversations—we realized we needed to push ourselves to create a variety of custom assets, custom-built for each age. For example, younger grades might enjoy some learning through some fun animated videos, while the slightly older grades might enjoy being challenged through interactive educational games.
Starting with our initially provided version of Daniel, we expanded the universe to include a bunch of friends and a few mentors, each with their own character bio, POV, and purpose in our world. All those years of watching Sesame Street, Hey Arnold, and Spongebob were paying off.
We then crafted high level story beats for video, and content outlines for each game, all versions of which included concepts based on digital comprehension topic. From there, we got to work crafting the assets over several months.
Why it worked:
- Multi-format/multimedia learning (video + game + web)
- Age-appropriate storytelling
- Strong narrative characters
- Accessibility for multiple audiences
DUCC is now being used in hundreds of classrooms across the US. It has been reviewed and approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health and is being provided as a resource to teachers in New York City Public Schools.
Kindergarten - 3rd Grade Video Series
As we crafted this series, we wanted to make sure our concepts, scripts and visuals evolved as our audience matured. So we kept that top of mind through each stage of production making intentional decisions are verbiage, punchlines, pacing, settings, and visual gags—each slightly adjusting from one grade to the next.
Episode 1 - Kindergarten
Episode 2 - First Grade
Episode 3 - Second Grade
Episode 4 - Third Grade
Interactive Learning Games
For the older kids, we crafted a series of interactive games testing their digital comprehension and educating them along the way. Below are some stills of the games, or you could play them for yourself below:
Additional Learning Assets
