Adapting PBS KIDS’ Hero Elementary to Educational Games

Creating educational digital games that complement a television property presents a number of interesting challenges. Especially when they’re supposed to be teaching science, while talking about superpowers. In this session, discover how Twin Cities PBS and Filament Games teamed up to co-develop a suite of educational games that integrate and align to pre-existing characters and world-building from PBS KIDS’ Hero Elementary animated series. We’ll begin our presentation with a discussion of transmedia educational game design strategies, before sharing relevant examples of how our teams successfully adapted themes from the STEM-focused superhero series into meaningful game mechanics.