About Maker Caper

Our mission

Maker Caper exists to teach kids the real ideas behind programming — sequences, loops, conditionals, functions, variables, and recursion — through a game they actually want to keep playing. No typing, no jargon, no worksheets. Just puzzles that make a new idea the thing that finally works.

We teach like a good teacher, not a quiz

Every world owns one concept and stretches it across ~30 puzzles. The puzzles are built so the shortcut fails and the new idea is the answer — flowers spaced apart make a loop the obvious move; a changing traffic light makes an if necessary. Kids discover the concept instead of memorizing it, and three-star goals reward doing it the clever way.

The research behind how we teach

Maker Caper’s teaching design is grounded in established research on how people learn to program and think computationally. To be clear about what that means: this research shaped how the game is built — we haven’t run our own clinical efficacy trials, and we don’t claim guaranteed outcomes. Here’s what informs the design and the feature each idea shaped:

• Constructionism — Papert, Mindstorms (1980): children learn deeply by building things they care about. The whole game is learning-by-doing, not lecture-then-quiz.
• Productive failure — Kapur (2008): struggling with a problem before the “aha” deepens understanding. Our “show-me-why” puzzles let the naive approach visibly fail first, then the new idea rescues it.
• Cognitive Load Theory & worked examples — Sweller (1988); Renkl & Atkinson (2003): manage how much a learner juggles at once, and fade support gradually. Our three-tier hints reveal help step by step instead of all at once.
• Parsons problems — Parsons & Haden (2006); Ericson et al.: arranging given pieces lowers the barrier vs. a blank page. Our “order-the-blocks” puzzles are exactly this.
• Spiral curriculum — Bruner (1960): revisit each concept with growing depth. Loops, conditionals, and functions recur across worlds, each time stretched further.
• Use–Modify–Create / PRIMM — Lee et al. (2011); Sentance & Waite (2017): scaffold from running and tweaking code toward writing it. Our fix-the-bug and modify puzzles sit between guided and open-ended.
• Computational thinking — Wing (2006): decomposition, pattern-finding, and abstraction as transferable habits — the skills our three-star goals reward.

Made for families

A grown-up owns the account; children play under a display name with no personal information. There are no ads and no data brokers. We built the safety in from the start because that’s the only acceptable bar for a product made for children.

Say hello

We’re a small team and we read every message. Questions, feedback, or a stuck puzzle? Contact us — or jump straight in and start playing free.