The Family Learning Cycle

This is a demo of an interactive explainer I designed and built for My Father's World (a homeschooling publisher) in 2015. They had a unique curriculum that they were really struggling to explain to their customers. With most curricula, if you have three kids of different ages, each year you buy three sets of books, and you teach three different classes. Instead, the Family Learning Cycle is designed to let you buy one set of books each year, teaching kids of differing ages the same material at different levels of depth.

This saves homeschooling parents a lot of time and money, but explaining the details was a major challenge to the business. Written explanations were unapproachably complex; verbal explanations at conventions didn't scale well. Upon learning about the problem, I drew on my love of board games to create this interactive explainer. I drew the graphics in Adobe Illustrator, sought critique from the people who best knew the Family Learning Cycle, and ultimately published it to our website, where 97% of our survey participants indicated it helped them understand how the curriculum worked.

To make learning easier, we work from simpler to more complex. The first example shows the system with one child, the second example shows it with four children, and at the bottom there's a sandbox mode where you can add as many children as you like.

Let's try it out.

Scroll down and click the "Next" button in the blue box to advance through the story.

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Not too complicated. Let's see how this works for a larger family.

Meet the Carpenters, who have just decided to try homeschooling their children.

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See how this might work for your family!

Use the controls below to create a token for each of your children. Then drag each of them onto the platform that represents each child's current grade, and start clicking the Advance button to see how all of them move through the Family Learning Cycle. Play around and have fun!

Important: This is an educational demo, not a placement tool. For best performance, call 573-202-2000 and one of our highly knowledgeable service representatives will help you customize the Family Learning Cycle to your family's needs.

Name Grade Preschool Pre-K Kindergarten 1st grade 2nd grade 3rd grade 4th grade 5th grade 6th grade 7th grade 8th grade 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade 12th grade Height Color

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Build your family however you like. Experiment to see how the Family Learning Cycle might work for them! The idea of the Family Learning Cycle is that all children in the Investigate section are studying the same material. Please move all tokens in the Investigate section onto one platform.

Build your family however you like. Experiment to see how the Family Learning Cycle might work for them! The idea of the Family Learning Cycle is that all children in the Investigate section are studying the same material. Please move all tokens in the Investigate section onto one platform.

Disclaimer: The names on this page are fictitious. Any resemblance to your family is purely coincidental. No children were harmed in the making of this page.