Update News
Millie Moreorless Release Date
March 17, in the year of our Lord 2016 --
The amazing adventures of Millie Moreorless demonstrates how
technology can make learning maths fun and empowering for
children with learning disabilities.
Millie Moreorless is an innovative new game for iPad and iPhone
co-designed with children with Down Syndrome to ensure that it
is inclusive and accessible for players of all abilities. As
they help the space adventurer Millie Moreorless explore
beautiful alien planets, players practice and develop their
basic number sense. Supported by leading Tech for Good funder
Nominet Trust, the game provides a fun and visually stimulating
learning environment, with a gentle difficulty curve, clear
progression and lots of collectable rewards. To celebrate the
involvement of children with Down Syndrome in the co-design and
testing, the app, is being released to coincide with World Down
Syndrome Day on Monday 21 March.
The game is based on pioneering scientific research in the field
of Magnitude, our instinctive ability to identify whether one
quantity is ‘more or less’ than another – without counting. This
ability is believed by some scientists to be the foundation of
all subsequent maths learning. However, research has revealed
that children with Down Syndrome often experience significant
developmental delays in this area. By helping players improve
their magnitude sense, its creators believe their game will lay
a foundation for children to learn the maths skills they will
need to be independent in adult life.
Millie Moreorless is the first app from brother and sister team
Will Jessop and Cara Jessop, co-founders of new accessible game
design company Enabling Play. Children of all abilities and
their parents have been at the very heart of the project from
the start, sharing their opinions, imaginations and values
throughout the design process, and testing iterative prototypes
of the game to ensure that it is fun and accessible. This
inclusive, participatory design is a key principle of Enabling
Play.
Cara Jessop and Will Jessop, the co-founders of Enabling Play,
say “Designing Millie Moreorless has been an incredibly
rewarding experience. We believe that by allowing ourselves to
be led by the young people themselves, we have created a game
that is fun, engaging and inclusive. It is so important to bring
players of all abilities into the mainstream. If we can help
children with Down Syndrome get better at maths and lay the
foundation for greater independence in adult life, then we will
all benefit as a society.”
Millie Moreorless was developed in partnership with the
BAFTA-nominated creative studio Made in Me and Dr Jill Porter
from the University of Reading, who is using the game to conduct
much-needed research into how children with Down Syndrome learn.
The project initially received R&D funding and support from the
REACT Play Sandbox.
Dr Jill Porter, University of Reading says “This is an important
and unique opportunity to investigate how children respond to
mathematical information in different learning contexts and to
tailor resources to meet their needs. Our research has
highlighted that learning maths does not have to be hard work.
New technologies combined with creativity can be very effective
in raising the achievements of children who struggle to
understand abstract concepts.”