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Posts | Batch 1
WEEK 1
POST 1 — TUESDAY
Bucket: Design Reality
Topic: Origin story — the tension between design and education
I used to think I’d end up in a corporate job in Bangalore. Product Design at NID. UI/UX Internships. The standard path.
Then I got drawn to design for children, and I never left.
What I’ve noticed is: there’s a real tension between design and education that nobody in either field talks about.
Design constantly asks us to evolve. Iterate, test, throw out what doesn’t work. A good designer can ship something in a week.
Education moves slowly, by necessity. A child needs time to fail, pick herself up, and try again. A curriculum needs an academic term, before you know if it worked.
So, how do you design for a child’s world when you believe in both?
The three spaces I’ve found are:
→ EdTech: fast feedback loops, real usage data, but often too focused on engagement over learning
→ NGOs: mission-driven, real reach, but constrained by donor goals & resources
→ Toys and games: play is learning for children, and products can respond quickly to a changing world
I’ve spent 10 years across all three. Orgs like UNICEF, Agastya Foundation, Magic Crate and IIT Gn gave me a deep look into all 3 spaces.
Jump Design is what I’m building now: a studio for companies that understand that the world isn’t designed for children, but it should be.
Not just make products look “fun”. But to design them right, from the inside.
What do you think is the bigger gap in learning design for children: design rigour or learning depth?
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POST 2 — THURSDAY
Bucket: Pedagogy Truth
Topic: Australia social media ban — the right question vs the wrong one
While some adults said, “Companies will now protect kids.”
Others believed, “Children will get on it anyway; bans are useless.”
Asking big tech to make non-addictive social media for children is like asking tobacco companies to develop safe cigarettes.
The product IS the problem. Social media is designed to maximise engagement. That’s how it makes money. You can’t make it “less addictive” without breaking the business model.
And banning it doesn’t fix the underlying question: what will children do to build friendships instead?
This is the question I think about when I design children’s products.
Not: “How do we make this unsafe thing safer?”
But: “How can we enable safe choices with this product?”
There’s a difference between a layer that protects a child and a child’s product built entirely to enable her agency.
Instead of struggling with the social media question, can we create a world for our children where they can safely learn to interact with their peers?
Real childhood friendships are hard & fun, and children are in control. The best children’s products create what researchers call “hard fun”: experiences that are challenging AND genuinely joyful.
What children’s products have you seen get this right?
POST 3 — SATURDAY
Bucket: Thought Leadership
Topic: Alternative education + hands-on learning as antidote to tech overload
When I was at school, looking out of the window was considered being ‘distracted’. Today, there are billions of windows where people dance, sing & even teach content engineered to compete with a teacher in the child’s pocket.
Now, we as educators have to answer the tough question of what our purpose is. If we are not here to deliver content or curb children’s technological overload, how do we remain relevant?
I keep coming back to the same answer: hands-on learning.
Children who are building, making, touching, or assembling are never distracted. They’re too busy. Their minds and bodies are motivated to solve problems.
This is why I believe the antidote to screen-based passive consumption isn’t only rules. It’s the original spark that makes us human:
Our Creativity.
Good toys, Well-designed craft kits or thoughtfully constructed games aren’t “old-fashioned alternatives to tech.” They’re more cognitively demanding than most apps and engage all our senses in the best way. And seeing your effort become a real thing you can hold is always priceless.
So many adults are turning to tangible hobbies to recover after their screen-based jobs. That’s not nostalgia. It’s neuroscience. There’s no substitute for hands-on learning in childhood.
What’s one hands-on activity or material that your child or students love?
Maria Montessori spent 7 years in India in the late 1930s and 40s. She collaborated with Rabindranath Tagore. She watched how children in Indian schools learned through objects, movement and physical interaction with the world.
Her conclusion wasn’t unique to European pedagogy. It was universal.
WEEK 2
POST 4 — TUESDAY
Bucket: Education Research
Topic: Blackboxed learning in toys, what companies don’t tell you
I recently had the opportunity to judge an agentic AI hackathon for college students, run by and the MoE. Thanks @Umang Surana for inviting me to judge, from a design & education POV. I learnt a lot and met some wonderful co-mentors & co-judges.
Today, anybody (at any age, with minimal coding skills) can create a sharp, usable, end-to-end website or app that can react to user data. All the coding and design skills are in a Black Box, and the engineer or designer may just need to make minor tweaks to get it fully functional.
From a learning design perspective, I worry that we’re taking this ‘Black Box’ philosophy too far, even for the youngest learners. A child actually needs to get through some struggles; the sense of accomplishment that comes through it is greater. Of course, the degree of struggles is debatable.
In education, breaking out of the Black Box is not a new concept. We heard of this (1) in (2) through the work of Seymour Papert & the constructionists, and even in (3). The idea is that unless we know where things are going wrong & we have opportunities to tinker with mistakes, change & learning through change will not happen.
Now we have “vibe coding”, which may feel similar to some toys or apps that claim a whole bunch of learning outcomes, but don’t let children actually tinker around if they make mistakes.
Press a button → hear an animal sound → “your child is learning about animals.”
Tap a screen → watch an alphabet dancing → “your child is learning to read.”
The problem is that real learning is frustrating. The child often fails at it. Tries again. Gets it. The child knows where they’re trying to reach, and they feel capable when they get there.
Many of us adults struggled in school and were punished for low scores. Instead, we should have been rewarded for our effort and for rising from failures. We need to understand that is a feature of learning, not a bug.
When I work on developing products for children, an important question I ask is: “Where in this product does the child struggle, and how can that experience be positive?”
What are your thoughts on learning with black boxes?
Citations:
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The best educational products I've worked on all have one thing in common: they let learners fail.
Last week I was invited to judge an agentic AI hackathon run by Capabl and the MoE. Thanks @Umang Surana for the opportunity!
Watching college students build functional apps end-to-end got me thinking about something I keep returning to in learning design: the Black Box problem.
Seymour Papert and the constructionists wrote about this decades ago.
Unless a learner knows where things are going wrong and has the opportunity to tinker with mistakes, real learning doesn't happen.
We've seen this in assessments, in computational thinking, and in how organisations learn.
Vibe coding is the latest version of Black Boxing
Prompt. Generate. Ship.
For adults moving fast, that's a reasonable trade-off. But we're applying the same logic to how children learn, and that's where it breaks.
"Press a button → hear an animal sound → your child is learning about animals."
"Tap a screen → watch an alphabet dancing → your child is learning to read."
No struggle, no failure, no real learning. Just the appearance of it.
The question I keep coming back to when developing products for children: where in this product does the child struggle, and how can that experience be positive? Many of us were punished in school for low scores when we should have been rewarded for our effort and for rising from failures.
Struggling is a feature of learning. Not a bug.
The students at the hackathon were sharp, and their ideas even sharper, but the same open question sits underneath all of it.
Do practices like ‘Vibe coding’ and ‘Black boxing’ make learning easier or harder?
What are your thoughts: Do children still need to struggle, and if you're building for them, would you build a black box?
POST 6 — SATURDAY
Bucket: Personal
Topic: What does a children’s learning designer actually do?
Most people think I make toys.
Sometimes I do. But that’s about 10% of what this job actually is.
Here’s what the other 90% looks like:
Research: I spend significant time reading development psychology, educational research, and anthropology before I touch a design brief. If I don’t understand how an 8-year-old processes information, I can’t design a puzzle that challenges but doesn’t frustrate her.
Prototype testing: I put things in front of children and watch what they do with them. They have agency, and I value their opinions. Children are brutally honest through their behaviour. If a prototype isn’t working, a child will abandon it fast.
Material safety: Before I decide a toy will be made of X material, I’ve handled dozens of alternatives. Weight, texture, sound when it falls, and how it feels after 6 months of use. Children put things in their mouths, throw them, and sleep on them. Material choices are not just aesthetic. For children, I need to be the responsible adult who keeps them safe.
Curriculum construction: For any learning product, I need to build out the universe of what they’ll learn with it and how to structure it best, in the right sequence, so that this universe has some roads and guideposts an explorer can refer to.
Systems thinking: Any product for children has two primary users: the child and the parent. This sets design for children apart from most design fields, as these two users often have opposite needs and priorities. The object lives in a classroom, in a home, and must be played with and put away. Must give the child joy and the parent purpose. Designing for the full context is the job.
I take childhoods as seriously as children inhabiting them do. I design for the entire kingdom of childhood, not just one fleeting experience of play.
Can you recall one childhood experience that was wholesome and well-designed?
WEEK 3
POST 7 — TUESDAY
Bucket: Design Reality
Topic: Popular vs educational toy design — why trending toys often teach nothing
When you think of toys, do you think of fidget spinners? Pop-its? Slime kits?
Billions of units sold. Genuinely popular with children across the world.
Do they form a lasting impression on a child’s mind?
I’m not being dismissive - these objects clearly do something for children. They provide sensory stimulation, a social currency (“my friends love my Slime!”), and a kind of meditative repetition.
But there’s a difference in the design category between a toy that satisfies a sensory need and one that builds a cognitive capacity.
Most popular toys are trendy. There are parallels in toy design and fashion design, where being part of the culture is valued. In fact, as early as the Indus Valley civilisation, we believe toys mirrored the latest tech (bullock carts in that context). Today, they contain sensors and aim to give kids the dopamine hit of viral content. They’re designed to be wanted, not to be used deeply.
Learning by design starts from the opposite direction, with “backwards design” principles.
You start with the child, not the trend. Specifically, what capacity or ability do you want her to have at the end of the experience? Then you work backwards: what activity would build that? What materials would make that activity possible? What failure modes would teach the right lessons?
This is hard, slow, expensive work. It doesn’t lend itself well to seasonal trend cycles.
But that’s the kind of toy and material design that I find genuinely interesting.
The best test of an educational toy isn’t whether a child wants it.
It’s whether, while she plays with it, she’s changing in a way that matters.
What’s a toy you’ve seen that genuinely changed how a child thinks or behaves?
POST 8 — THURSDAY
Bucket: Pedagogy Truth
Topic: Why are schools needed in the information age?
I often get asked variations of this question: “If children can learn every piece of information from the internet, why should they go to school?” “My child has made an amazing app. He has a career already. What does school have to offer?” The question underneath this one is, what is the role of a school other than babysitting a child while the parent is occupied?
The most important reason is to protect the idea of childhood itself.
Schools, big or small, private or public, make sure that every child has a safe and structured environment to explore their inner and outer worlds. Imagine a world where a child only had access to their parents’ universe, no choice of friends or imagination of individuality. Imagine a world where a human being was born and put to work, without the notion of 18 years of childhood, where she had to be a “productive member of society” from day 1. That’s the promise of school, a childhood. A period in every person’s life where they can be cared for, not a period of blankness that needs to be filled with information. A childhood should be a truly exploratory journey that we can gift to every young person.
Of course, the opposite also holds: when schools become places that do exactly the opposite to a child, we need change. But there are no substitutes for the social-emotional skills a child can gain in a school environment. As a species, one of our greatest strengths has always been nurturing communities and protecting our young. (See Humankind by Rutger Bregman) So, if we believe in the idea of a ‘child’, we believe in the idea of needing a space for the child to not be an adult. And one hopes that schools can be this very space for every child.
How do you see the role of schools in childhoods?
POST 8 — THURSDAY
Bucket: Pedagogy Truth
Topic: Why are schools a good space for SEL?
Children are more likely to develop social-emotional skills at school than at home.
Not because parents don’t care. Because of how SEL actually works.
Daniel Kahneman’s work on decision-making shows that we learn best when we experience real consequences in low-stakes environments.
Home is high stakes for a child. The relationship with parents carries enormous emotional weight. When a child fails at something at home — loses her temper, can’t share, can’t regulate — the consequences are real and personal.
School and games create something different: structured situations with social stakes but emotional safety.
When a child plays a game and loses, she experiences disappointment. But nobody’s relationship is damaged. She can try again immediately.
When a child navigates a group project at school, she practices perspective-taking with peers — people she has to negotiate with, not people she’s unconditionally loved by.
This is why I believe the most effective SEL tools are games and structured classroom activities — not parent workshops or family conversation guides.
That’s not a criticism of parenting. Parents aren’t supposed to be the entire village.
They’re supposed to be the anchor. Schools and well-designed activities provide the practice ground.
How have you seen schools or programs create these kinds of safe practice conditions effectively?
POST 9 — SATURDAY
Bucket: Personal
Topic: Why I love history now — but hated it in school
I was terrible at history in school.
Dates. Kings. Wars. Memorise, reproduce, forget.
Now I use history every day.
Here’s what changed: I started understanding history as a design document.
Every object people made in the past was a solution to a problem they had. The materials they used were the ones available to them. The form it took reflected what they knew, what they valued, and what they were capable of.
When I look at a toy or learning tool from another era — a 19th-century puzzle, a traditional Indian game, a classroom material from a one-room school — I’m not looking at an antique. I’m reading a brief.
What problem was this solving? What did the maker understand about children that modern designers have forgotten? What constraints produced this form, and what can those constraints teach me?
This lens makes history endlessly useful.
The reason I hated it in school was that we were taught history as a series of facts to remember. Nobody asked us what those facts meant for the future.
The history of children’s play, of educational systems, of the objects children have been given across cultures and centuries — all of it is relevant to the work I do now.
I wish someone had told me that in Class 10.
What subject did you hate in school that you now find genuinely interesting?
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