The Interledger Community 🌱: Dee Saigal

Erase All Kittens - Final Report

Dee Saigal — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 23:25:23 +0000

Project Description

We're building Erase All Kittens - an online adventure game designed to equip young children with professional digital skills and knowledge of essential topics, including entrepreneurism and climate change. EAK is different to other coding tools because as players progress, they can edit the source code that governs the game environment building and fixing levels as they play. Our mission is to give every child - especially girls - life-long confidence in their own abilities and potential, through teaching them web development skills from an early age.

Project Update

Since our interim grant report, we’ve been working on new gameplay content teaching HTML, CSS and Javascript skills, making the game fully compatible with all browsers, QA testing and one-to-one beta testing with students, fixing bugs, and marketing EAK and our Grant for the Web partnership through blog posts articles and our social media accounts.

We ended up extending our grant schedule having underestimated the time needed to reach our objectives, and we moved the date of our soft launch forward to mid-October so that we could include a new tutorials and hints system with VOs following feedback from younger students. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far and very grateful for the opportunity to experiment with web monetisation, and be part of an inspiring community working towards building a fairer and more inclusive internet for everyone.

What we achieved

Designed and developed a new website and 3-4 hours of gameplay content including over 30 new coding challenges teaching HTML and CSS skills, 16 coding badges and 52 kitten cards
https://eraseallkittens.com/
80% of 20 students aged 9-12 completed each new level during beta-testing at School 21 in London
90% of children wanted to learn more about coding after playing, half of them being girls

Increased traction - 34,000 new sign ups during the project’s duration and EAK is now being used in approximately 3500 schools, mostly in the US and UK
Erase All Kittens was featured as one of the top coding tools in Forbes, Mashable and WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/coding-games-for-kids-girls/
Integration of Coil into the EAK website
Designed ‘Register with Coil' online banners for our website, promotional materials and illustrated e-book gift to encourage players to join the web monetisation movement by signing up with Coil

Published two blog posts about our partnership with Grant for the Web and wider mission to promote diversity and inclusion on the web - 'The Start of Something New!' and 'Get Free Gifts from EAK!' (total of 700 views on Medium and Linkedin). We also shared these on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook https://eraseallkittens.medium.com/get-free-gifts-from-eak-6d3133a24098
Collected detailed feedback on the Coil registration process and user journey, and learned how the UX/UI could be improved for more sign ups - https://docs.google.com/document/d/18yb5uXN34wHeJ_R5fkw5qYpmJQPBu62QT2AUdl39s-o/edit

What's next?

With our grant period at an end and the recent soft launch of our new website, we're now focusing on developing new gameplay content and marketing the extended version of Erase All Kittens to parents and schools so that our company can become sustainable.

We're also building a new Hackable Cards platform for celebratory days including Christmas, Halloween and Valentines Day, where children and adults can easily personalise cards using HTML and CSS and share these on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We learnt a lot from our Web Monetisation experiments with Coil and Uphold, particularly in the areas of UX/UI, and will consider similar experimentations in future for full access to our Hackable Cards which we're currently rebuilding and expanding : ) https://eraseallkittens.com/hackable-cards

If you're interested in our work, you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (@eraseallkittens) or reach out to us at hello@eraseallkittens.com

Special thanks to Desigan, Chris, Erika and Ayesha from Grant for the Web for supporting us with this grant and introducing us to some awesome people in the gaming community!

Erase All Kittens - Interim Report June 2021

Dee Saigal — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 19:24:20 +0000

About the Project

We're making Erase All Kittens, a web-based adventure game designed to inspire children aged 8-13 to code whilst equipping them with professional digital skills and knowledge of essential topics for the 21st Century (e.g. cybersecurity). Our mission is to give girls confidence in STEM and prepare them for 21st Century careers.

Goals

Develop 5 hours of gameplay content teaching 8-13 year olds basic HTML, CSS and Javascript skills - for the new version of EAK and also as an incentive for parents to sign up to Coil, since we'll be offering early access to this content
Integrate Coil into the EAK website
Design additional content for our website/promotional materials to inspire people to join the movement to promote diversity and inclusion on the internet through Web Monetization
Increase our traction / start earning revenue
Carry out further monetisation experiments - how to deliver, use, segment, and channel content, to parents

Project Update

New gameplay

We're making great progress with developing new gameplay and original HTML and CSS coding mechanics, and we're on track to release the new version of Erase All Kittens (5 hours of gameplay) in late July/early August. This version will allow kids to build and fix levels as they play using HTML and CSS, to save kittens (quirky kitten cards instead of gifs) in the Internet Universe. We will be adding levels teaching Javascript in September, and combinations of the three languages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWLVJUtNiDg&feature=youtu.be

We're currently working on interactive dialogue and implementing the tutorials and hints - these will be integrated into the game in 3-4 weeks time and we'll then start beta-testing with students aged 8-12.

Integrating Coil

Early on in the project, our developers ran into several unexpected issues with integrating Coil into our existing game, which is why we asked for a 3 month extension.

Initial Fix on Old Website:

This was a long standing bug - where the game API was sending authentication cookies with eraseallkittens.com as the domain. Although the game authentication logic was looking for .eraseallkittens.com (note the dot prefix.) We implemented a DNS interceptor (using nginx on a new AWS server instance) that took the API calls, modified them to suit what the old game expected and re-sent them. This was deemed a more efficient solution than to modify the old game because of the very old and rare technology involved. This fix worked.

Issue with gameplay:

Players were reporting they were not able to progress through the entire (old) game - even though they were logged into the existing website. Players were finding they were logged out after a short period of play.

Background:

At a certain point in the game we check that the player is logged in and it was at this point where the authentication was failing. This had been working for a couple of months after a similar fix was applied to forward cookies from the API in the correct format. Just prior to these new reports we had also integrated Coil into the old website - another change that we suspected could have inadvertently broken something. The new development team at EAK were not particularly familiar with the legacy codebase (ASP4 for the website and LiveScript for the game) for both the website nor the game so debugging took longer.

Investigation and Fix on the new Issue:

Having integrated with Coil and fixed a similar issue 1 month ago (see above), we double-checked our previous code changes for both these and everything looked fine. Further investigations led us to inspect the HTTPS headers to the authentication API and we discovered that our Content Delivery Network (Cloudflare) had discontinued support for one of the three essential cookies that both our website and game were expecting to receive (__cfduid, eak-sess and eak-sess.sig).

We found that Cloudflare is deprecating the __cfduid cookie. They stated in a blog post: "Starting on 10 May 2021, we will stop adding a “Set-Cookie” header on all HTTP responses. The last __cfduid cookies will expire 30 days after that." https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-cfduid-cookie/

So the real cause of the new issue turned out to be an external event - not Coil, not the old website, not the old game and not the nginx patch we did earlier. Tracing this through took quite a while as yet again, we were debugging an unfamiliar legacy codebase.

The legacy ASP server was hard-coded to expect 3 cookies back from the API server (__cfduid, eak-sess and eak-sess.sig) and now the API server is only sending back two cookies - which means authentication broke between the website and the game.

After a while we determined that the only way to fix the new issue was to modify the legacy ASP code since that was using the now non-existent cookie. We modified the authentication code on the website to stop looking for this depreciated cookie before granting the actual authentication cookie, tested it, and the the issue was resolved. Players can again sign into the website and be automatically signed into the game once again.

The legacy ASP website has a build and deploy process which involved the new EAK team running virtual servers just to make the modifications and perform the build and deploy which increased the round-trip timescales for development and testing.

The combined knowledge and experience of the three developers was employed to bring this fix about.

Communications and Marketing

We designed website banners which can be seen at the top of the Erase All Kittens website, to encourage players to sign up using Coil - offering early access to our new game and our new illustrated storybook. The cost for registering with Coil ($5 per month) was initially displayed in the second banner but we removed this 2 weeks ago after receiving feedback from advisors with backgrounds in UX/UI and marketing. We kept the message very simple, focusing on our bonus content followed by "Join the Coil community and support creators like us!".

We published a blog post on Medium about our partnership with Coil and reposted this on our social media platforms, receiving approximately 200 views.
https://eraseallkittens.medium.com/the-start-of-something-new-4a3a07c4c3eb

We didn't want to carry out further marketing and promotional activities until all development issues had been sorted, so we put this work on hold until these had been fixed.

We provided Coil with a document "Coil Integration - Summary of tasks and issues" consisting of detailed feedback from our development team and several advisors who had signed up to EAK using Coil. This included different ideas for UX and increased user adoption.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18yb5uXN34wHeJ_R5fkw5qYpmJQPBu62QT2AUdl39s-o/edit?usp=sharing

Traction and revenue

Our traction increased from 150,000 to 170,000 players globally, and EAK is now being used in 3200 schools in the UK and US. In 2020, our aim was to reach 500,000 players, however we found that this was unrealistic given that our main priorities were in the areas of fundraising and development. We plan to release the new version of EAK in 7-8 weeks time, selling to parents and schools initially in the UK and US.

What's next?

Now that all of the issues on the development-side have been fixed and we've updated and optimised our online banners, we intend to focus solely on marketing and further monetisation experiments - how to deliver, use, segment, and channel content, to parents.

EAK is being featured in upcoming articles for Forbes and Mashable, and we'll be publicising our partnership with Coil - aiming to achieve 3000 sign ups by the end of this year.

What community support would benefit your project?

We'd love to speak with more game makers who have partnered with Coil, to discuss opportunities and joint promotions to encourage more people to sign up.

The start of something new!

Dee Saigal — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 14:33:55 +0000

Hi everyone,

After having spent the past few months optimising our existing game (built in 2017) and working on new gameplay, we've now fully integrated Coil, and we've published banners on our website to encourage players to sign up with this option. Coil subscribers will receive exclusive early access to our new gameplay and our illustrated storybook along with the free version of the game.

We've just published a blogpost about this and web monetization in general - it would be great if you could help spread the word!

https://link.medium.com/VY4LfWJhtfb

Thanks!
Dee

CEO & Creative Director
Erase All Kittens