🐻 Read or the Bear!

Where it came from

My kid is learning to read, and honestly, that's boring. Primers, syllables, the usual. Dirt bikes, on the other hand, are always interesting. I remembered old typing trainers where letters lie on a road and thought: what if you read aloud instead of pressing keys?

That's how a game appeared where reading is the throttle. Read a syllable, move. Stay quiet, the bear gets closer. The motivation is clear to any six-year-old.

How to play

Open the game, pick a tale and a level, press go. The browser will ask for microphone access; without it the game can't hear.

There are three levels: single syllables, a word read slowly by syllables, and whole words. There are eight simplified Russian fairy tales, plus a mode with a deck of two hundred-odd words that doesn't repeat from game to game. If a syllable just won't come out, an adult can accept it with the space bar; the game counts it as a mistake, but the bear backs off.

Stars and the shop

A finished track gives one to three stars depending on mistakes. Stars buy new chasers and vehicles: a moose or a zombie instead of the bear, a tricycle, a skateboard or, for a lot of stars, a toilet instead of the bike. The toilet is, of course, the main goal.

How the game hears a child

The hardest part. At first the browser did the speech recognition, and it was a poor student: it heard English words instead of Russian syllables and went silently deaf from time to time.

Then we built recognition into the game itself. It runs on the device, with no internet, and is told in advance which syllables are on the road, so it picks among them. The game also compares sounds, not letters, because children swallow endings and swap vowels, and that's fine. After two misses in a row the requirements soften so the child doesn't give up.

Who drew it

The art was drawn by ChatGPT: the rider, the bear frame by frame, the other chasers and the vehicles. There are two versions of the scene where the bear does catch up, a rougher one and a gentler one, switchable in the menu.

On an iPad

The game opens in Safari and can be added to the Home Screen like a regular app. The first launch takes longer because a 45 MB recognition model is downloaded; after that it stays on the device.

Questions and answers