WonJo Kids is a vibrant educational app designed for children aged 2 to 8, set in the imaginative world of Pily Town. This app blends life skills with academic learning through playful games, catchy songs, and engaging videos, all crafted to spark curiosity and wonder. Every aspect of WonJo Kids is guided by education and child development experts and rooted in research-based practices, creating a safe and nurturing environment where children can explore and grow with confidence.
In Pily Town, children encounter diverse characters and scenarios that foster empathy and broaden their perspectives. Inspired by Montessori principles, our self-directed, hands-on activities cater to each child’s developmental stage, allowing them to learn at their own pace. With a focus on holistic development, our content aligns with recognized curriculum standards and covers essential areas like math, science, language, community, and well-being.
WonJo Kids is committed to reimagining educational entertainment by combining joyful learning with scientific principles, creating a platform where every child can build a foundation of happiness and confidence through playful discovery.
While WonJo Kids welcomes children of all ages who are interested in our games, songs, and videos, it is specifically designed for children aged 2 to 8 years old. This age range ensures that our content is tailored to support the developmental needs of young children during these crucial early years.
Who is behind WonJo Kids?
The WonJo Kids team is a diverse group of professionals dedicated to creating exceptional learning experiences for children.
Our team features:
* Preschool Teachers and Educational Consultants, including a Montessori Educator, who provide insights into early childhood education and help shape our curriculum.
* Child Development Specialists with a Ph.D. in Psychology who guide our approach to fostering emotional and cognitive growth.
* Scriptwriters who craft the engaging scripts for our videos and songs, ensuring they are educational and entertaining.
* Artists who create the vibrant visuals, character designs, and animations that bring our world to life.
* Game Developers who build and refine our interactive games, ensuring they are both engaging and educational.
* UX/UI Designers who focus on making our app user-friendly and visually appealing, enhancing the overall user experience.
* Songwriters and Musicians who compose catchy tunes and songs that make learning fun.
* Sound Engineers who ensure high-quality audio for a rich and immersive experience.
* Data Analysts who analyze user interactions to continuously improve our app’s effectiveness and engagement.
Together, our team blends creativity, educational expertise, and technical skills to create a safe, enriching, and joyful experience for young learners.
The American Academy of Pediatrics offers valuable guidelines to help navigate screen time:
* For children under 18 to 24 months: It’s best to avoid digital media, except for video chatting like FaceTime with grandparents.
* For toddlers (18 to 24 months): If you choose to introduce digital media, opt for high-quality programming and more importantly, watch the show or play the mobile game together with your child.
* For kids aged 2 to 5 years: Limit screen use to 1 hour of high-quality programming per day, watch together, discuss content, and relate it to the real world.
At WonJo Kids, we align with these guidelines and recommend not exceeding these limits. Our app is designed to be engaging without promoting excessive use. We’ve intentionally made our games short and enriching, encouraging a healthy balance between screen time and other activities. We encourage your child to enjoy WonJo Kids briefly, then move on to offline play and exploration.
At WonJo Kids, we recognize that every child is unique, which is why we embrace learner variability by adapting our content to meet the diverse needs and interests of each child. Learner variability refers to the understanding that every child learns differently, with unique strengths, challenges, and preferences. We incorporate strategies from the Digital Promise Learner Variability Project to ensure that our games, songs, and videos are not just engaging but also tailored to nurture each child’s distinct needs and preferences. By addressing their cognitive abilities, motivation, and social-emotional development, we ensure that every child feels valued, supported, and engaged in their learning journey.
At WonJo Kids, we recognize that every child is unique and learns differently. To illustrate how we address learner variability, let’s explore how we support two different children: Emily, who benefits from real-life connections and clear audio-visual interactions, and Oliver, who needs a sense of belonging and support in developing social skills. Here’s how we tailor our approach to meet their individual needs.
Let’s meet Emily
Emily is a 5-year-old who thrives when she can use what she learns in school in her everyday life. She loves seeing how classroom concepts play out in real-world activities and problems. Due to her mild hearing loss, Emily struggles to focus and understand instructions in noisy environments like the classroom.
Connecting Learning to Real-Life Situations
To reinforce Emily’s understanding of math concepts like numbers, counting, and shapes, WonJo Kids provides activities that integrate these ideas into daily experiences. For example, in the Grocery Shopping game, Emily learns how mathematical operations are used in daily transactions. The Baking and Tailoring games teach her about measurement in practical settings. Games like Tracer Mole and Number Express allow Emily to trace numbers with her fingers, linking symbolic numbers to real-world quantities. In the episode Count on Cookies, Emily learns about counting and division with real cookies and a captivating storyline, making abstract concepts more relatable. The song Shape Disco helps Emily discover how abstract shapes relate to everyday objects, reinforcing her learning in an engaging and tangible way.
Enhancing Learning Through Audio and Visuals
WonJo is designed mainly for individual use, allowing Emily to learn in a controlled environment where she can hear clearly. By using the app on her phone, Emily can adjust the volume and find a quiet space at home, ensuring she fully understands the instructions and content. She can turn off background music and focus on essential voice lines and sound effects. To accommodate Emily’s hearing loss, WonJo Kids combines audio and visual elements. Our games include tactile interactions, such as drawing numbers with her fingers in Tracer Mole, and manipulatives in games like Math Delivery to enhance her hands-on learning experience.
Let’s meet Oliver
Oliver, a 4-year-old, feels shy and lacks confidence in forming friendships due to his introverted nature and a birthmark on his face. His struggle to express his emotions and connect with others has led to a sense of disconnection and decreased motivation at school, affecting both his learning and social development.
Supporting Oliver’s Sense of Belonging and Social Skills
WonJo Kids supports Oliver’s sense of belonging by introducing characters he can relate to. For instance, Julio, a character with a visible physical difference like Oliver’s, helps foster a sense of connection. In the game Find My Chameleon, Julio interacts with Oliver, asking for his help to find a missing chameleon while teaching spatial prepositions. This interaction helps Oliver feel understood and represented, reinforcing his sense of belonging.
Additionally, the episode Perfect Harmony celebrates diversity and shows how everyone contributes to a harmonious community, which helps Oliver feel confident and valued. Oliver can also observe and learn social skills from the characters in our videos. In the episode The Sock Mystery, characters demonstrate collaborative problem-solving, conflict resolution, and empathy. He can practice these skills further by helping others in games like First Aid Robot and Animal Care, or by taking on different roles in Grocery Shopping and Fruit Mix, where he pretends to be a customer or a juice stand vendor. These activities provide Oliver with opportunities to build and practice social skills in a supportive environment, helping him feel more connected to those around him.
Enhancing Emotional Understanding
WonJo Kids offers various content to support Oliver’s emotional understanding. In the Mood Playground game, he can explore Candice’s feelings in a free-play mode, allowing him to safely learn about different emotions. The Emotions Card Matching game helps him practice recognizing emotional expressions, enhancing his emotional literacy. The songs Ding Dong Emotions On and If You’re Happy and You Know It provide a fun way for Oliver to connect with different feelings.
A growth mindset is the belief that abilities and intelligence can improve with effort, learning, and practice. Instead of seeing skills as fixed, children with a growth mindset understand that they can get better at things by trying new strategies, working hard, and asking for help when needed. This way of thinking helps children stay motivated, especially when they face challenges, because they know that effort and perseverance lead to growth. It encourages them to embrace mistakes as part of the learning process and believe that they can always improve with time and dedication.
At WonJo Kids, we believe that abilities can be developed through effort, learning from mistakes, and trying new strategies. We nurture this growth mindset in everything we do, encouraging children to view challenges as opportunities for growth. This approach helps them build resilience and confidence in their ability to learn and improve.
In our Earthly Adventures animated series, characters face difficulties and work hard to overcome them, demonstrating the power of perseverance and effort. Our open-ended games offer multiple solutions, allowing kids to focus on the learning process rather than just finding the right answer. In our games, we celebrate educational milestones throughout the journey, emphasizing effort and perseverance rather than focusing solely on winning at the end. When kids make mistakes, we give gentle hints to guide them and encourage them to keep trying and not give up, promoting problem-solving and resilience.
Welcome to the journey behind our extraordinary games! Here’s how we transform a learning goal into a captivating educational experience:
Setting the Course with Curriculum: We begin by selecting topics from our comprehensive curriculum, which is based on recognized educational frameworks like the Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards, and Head Start. Each topic is chosen to support children’s growth and development.
Defining Learning Outcomes with Expert Guidance: Our team of education and child development experts thoroughly explores the learning objectives. They draw on best practices and scientific research to ensure we’re creating effective and engaging content.
Plotting the Course with Collaborative Ideation: Our education experts, developmental psychologists, content developers, game designers, and artists brainstorm together. We choose ideas that align with our learning goals, are age-appropriate, support developmental growth, and keep young minds engaged.
Crafting Content: With the plan in place, our production team brings the game to life. Education and child development experts oversee the process to ensure everything aligns with the learning goals and is suitable for the intended age group.
Kid-Approved Testing: We share our prototypes with kids! We observe where they excel, where they struggle, and whether they’re having a blast. Their feedback helps us understand what works well and where improvements are needed.
Incorporating Children’s Insights: We value children’s opinions, and adjust the game based on their feedback, fine-tuning it to better meet their needs and interests.
Continuous Improvement: Our commitment doesn’t end when the content is ready. We’re always learning and growing. We collect feedback from families, teachers, and—of course—our little learners. Together, we create an ever-evolving learning experience.
To build a curriculum that truly supports both academic and personal growth, we took three key steps:
- We analyzed well-established educational frameworks such as Common Core, Head Start, NGSS, and CASEL to ensure our content aligns with essential academic foundations.
- We reviewed reports from organizations like the World Economic Forum to understand the critical skills children need today and in the future.
- We collaborated with teachers from various educational approaches, such as Montessori, along with education specialists and child development experts, to identify essential academic, cognitive, and social skills for different age groups.
From this research, we shaped our curriculum around five key learning domains:
- Logic and Math: Covering essential skills like counting, recognizing shapes, understanding operations, and developing critical thinking and problem-solving abilities.
- Literacy and Language: Building early reading and writing skills, starting with recognizing sounds and letters and progressing to reading comprehension and storytelling.
- Science and Nature: Encouraging curiosity and discovery, from understanding the five senses in early years to exploring concepts like gravity and ecosystems as children grow.
- Wellbeing: Supporting social and emotional development, including recognizing emotions, practicing mindfulness, and developing self-regulation strategies suited to different ages.
- Community: Teaching kindness, respect, and social responsibility, from basic manners like saying thank you to understanding community roles and teamwork.
These five domains are deeply connected, not separate subjects. We blend them to make learning more meaningful, such as combining math with storytelling or science with social skills. This way, children see how different concepts and ideas come together in real life, making learning more engaging and relevant.
Beyond these five domains, we also focus on core skills like creativity, resilience, and flexibility. These foundational qualities are woven into our curriculum to help children develop a mindset that empowers them to navigate challenges, explore new ideas, and thrive in a constantly changing world.
Our curriculum is constantly evolving with new research, technological advancements, and emerging educational insights. At WonJo Kids, learning is not just about what children know, but about who they become.