Brush Up
Brush the chewers! Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!
Hello again! Welcome to my third critique blog post where I will do an in-depth analysis about educational game design. Today I will cover the game called Brush Up, a toothbrush teaching game for kids age 4+ years old, developed by GamesThatWork. This game operates on iOS/Android. You can play it for free, but they have a one-time in-game premium content purchase for $9.99 which you will get new game modes, additional prizes, and a full year of daily reports for parents. The high-level objective of this game is to brush your teeth along with the mascot named Budd until you complete cleaning your entire mouth.
Learning Objective:
The ultimate learning objective is to educate players, mostly small children, on how to brush the teeth correctly. It’s quite intuitive but many adults also miss this concept. There are outer surface, inner surface, and the biting surface (only crushing teeth has this side). In the game, the players are supposed to brush along every tooth on every surface. By brushing, it means to put the toothbrush next to your teeth (touching the gum) and brush it 5 times at least and sweep. Easy as it may sound! Scientific facts prove that children who follow this toothbrush training carefully for 2 weeks have a significant improvement in toothbrushing performance. As a result, apart from educating players, this game is supposed to help players retain the correct way of toothbrushing regardless of the players continuing to play this game or don’t play it anymore.
Game Components:
At the start, the player has to choose which hand they will use for brushing — left or right hand. Then, they will meet with Budd, the toothbrush tutor, with dirty teeth. He will demonstrate to you how to brush the teeth. Before the game begins, there will be a small window that pops up that shows player selfie view. Players will confirm their readiness and then the game will start.
The core mechanics of this game is to brush along with Budd. The players will follow each step and each tooth closely and brush along with Budd. They design Budd teeth to have only 20 teeth just like kid’s milk teeth. Brush up also has a point rewarding system — after finishing all the teeth, there is a small quiz asking you to match the position of Budd’s toothbrushing with the player’s position. If you correctly match the picture, you’ll earn 1 point each to spend on decoration.
Brush the chewers, Clean the Chewers, Shine the Chewers,
Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!
For the dynamics of the game, I am fascinated by the tone of Budd’s voice actor. He speaks in a melody. Once we start brushing, it’s not just we brush along but it’s a sing-along! The lyrics of the song are well-written in that it perfectly ties the learning objective — the toothbrush instruction — to the core gameplay loop that makes the players feel engaged and keep continuing to brush the teeth. In the song, Budd will call out each teeth: the crushes, the chewers, or the biters, and say what action to do with that teeth. Players should feel the urgency of cleaning the teeth because they will feel that it’s dirty. After cleaning one pair of teeth, the bacteria will get cleaned off and players will follow along with Budd and see their teeth get cleaner as they keep continue.
In terms of player experiences, as an adult who already knew how to brush and I have 32 teeth instead of 20, this game reminds me of a general idea of how to position my toothbrush with the gum — brush it and sweep. However it’s not fair to critique this game from an adult’s perspective, so I will imagine that I’m a kid who doesn’t know how to brush first. I believe Brush Up is doing a great job in creating a fun experience for kids from its song and music. Also, the more you play, the more points you have to decorate, so it will keep the kids engaged with this game from using it every morning and night.
Learning Science Principles:
- Quizzing: the game imposes a mini quiz at the end of the toothbrush. As we mentioned before, it will ask for matching Budd’s toothbrush position with the player’s one. However, I don’t think this practice contributes any learning towards the learning objective for the players.
- Temporal Contiguity: the game presents the dirty teeth, brush along with audio instruction via a song, and the clean teeth after finishing the toothbrush. This helps the players understand what’s going on.
- Coherence: the game is very minimal and only presents only visuals and audio that truly relate to toothbrush instructions. The total time to complete is about 3 minutes and players have to do this every day. So, I think it’s very important that the game designer keep it minimal and coherent with the learning objective — they didn’t put anything extraneous to the game except the decoration.
Overall Critique
To be fair with the game designer, I will critique this game based on the kid’s perspective. I believe that the kids would find this toothbrush game a fun and enjoyable experience. Apart from learning how to brush, at least the kids can enjoy the moment when they brush the teeth.
This game is another good example that demonstrates an excellent integration — the learning objective ties closely with the core gameplay loop — the brush and sing along. I believe that the kids who grow up playing this game will be able to remember how to brush the teeth correctly from this game. Even though kids will not play this game forever — they will stop playing this game at some time in their lives, this game has a high potential in teaching and transferring permanent toothbrush knowledge to the person. I’ll give it 5 out of 5.
