About 10 minutes. Your child decides what their game looks like. How it plays comes later, once they’ve seen it on screen.

Your task

Get the pencils out. Your child designs what floats up the screen, what’s behind it, and what colours everything is. Then they give their game a name.

You’ll need

• Pages 1 and 2 of the design sheets (the bubbles page and the looks page), or plain paper, or a drawing app on a tablet
• Pencils, crayons or pens

Prefer to just draw? Use the “Draw your game” sheet instead. It’s a picture of the game screen with empty bubbles, so your child can draw the whole thing and you can ask about anything that’s missing.

Parent guide

What your child does: draws lots of ideas for what floats up, and stars their favourite. Then they fill in the looks page, with your help if they want it. You can do the writing, but the ideas need to be theirs.

What you do: ask the questions below, one at a time. If your child wants help writing, add short labels to their drawing, using their words rather than yours.

Draw it, write it, or both. Any of these is fine. The drawings are just for planning, and they don’t go into the AI. In the next step your child reads their plan out loud while you type.

Before you move on, make sure you know:

• What floats up
• What’s behind it (the background)
• What colours they want

Anything else is a bonus.

Questions to ask:

• Where does the game happen? What can you see behind the bubbles?
• What floats up? What does it look like?
• Is there anything inside it?
• What colours do you want?
• How big are they?
• What’s your game called?

Sentence starters, for talking it through or writing it down:

• “Behind the bubbles you can see…”
• “The things that float up are…”
• “Inside each one there is…”
• “The colours are…”
• “They are big / middle-sized / small”
• “My game is called…”

If they’re really stuck: wait a little longer first, or ask the question a different way. A quiet child is often a thinking child. If they still have nothing, offer a few very different options, like under the sea, in space or in a garden, and let them change it, add to it or pick something else entirely.

The big idea: the more your child decides now, the closer the game will be to what they imagined. Anything they don’t decide, the computer decides for them.