Adventures of KALQY
KALQY is an active gamified learning platform where the child can access these games — a Game Centre gateway to camera-based, body-landmark tracked stories for ages 3–6.
Overview
KALQY is an interactive learning platform for children aged 3–6. The Game Centre is the gateway to the active game-learning atmosphere: the application guides the player to the game and the inbuilt progress tracker lets parents follow the learning curve of each individual child, understand the necessary requirements, and attend areas in the early stages of learning. The Game Centre can also provide automated support based on data received from the learner to enhance learning by identifying the field where the child needs more attention.
The challenge
Deliver real foundational-stage curriculum — literacy, numeracy, motor and emotional development — to children who can’t read yet. Teach the same concept at three levels of visible abstraction, as a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old can sit side by side. Track everything on the backend the child experiences none of it as assessment.
The approach
Replace the tap with the child’s own body, tracked through the camera. Wrap every skill inside a story with no villain and no fail state. Each game centre is a self-contained unit played sequentially in 1–5 minute sessions, with difficulty calibrated to the child’s age band and adjusting based on gameplay responses.
The outcome
- A complete curriculum-mapped design system: 10 games, 4 age bands, 3 difficulty tiers — roughly 400 levels in total.
- 8 games fully specified end-to-end, 2 mastery trials in final review, ready to move into production and build.
- Motion capture — physical body movements captured through the device’s front camera and mapped to in-game actions.
- Accessible fallback: all camera mechanics have a tap/screen fallback so the game is never inaccessible without a camera.
Turo’s Tales
Turo’s Tales is a series of stories well connected and the incidents in the story is designed as games, so that the child will be immersed in an imaginary world and the problems in the world. The objective is to find the solutions to the problems in these stories, curated against the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) India, NEP 2020 and NCF-FS 2022 foundational-stage frameworks and the Panchakosha model of development — body, breath, mind, wisdom and joy as five layers of a child’s growth.
Story & world
The child enters a magical world with the help of a guardian, and reaches Master Turo — a giant tortoise. From there the Child — Protagonist starts his journey with Master Turo. On the way the child encounters few friends: the lion, the fish and the bear. With all five of them together they start a journey to help and learn from the world. There is no antagonism in the story — the world’s problems are always caused by a missing thing, never a bad actor, and the child wins by understanding it, not by defeating something.
Game & level design
- 10 games, each story has a game in it — 4 bands, and in each band there are 3 difficulty levels.
- Game flow: Game centre → Turo’s Tales → Story → Game → Learning → Feedback → Badge → next story.
- Age bands 3 to 3.5, 3.5 to 4.5, 4.5 to 5.5 and 5.5 to 6 map to easy / medium / hard difficulty.
- A master activity runs in the background feeding a progress report and developmental assessment for parents and teachers.
Deconstruction — Word Eggs
Word Eggs is a letter-recognition and word-building game set in the Whispering Forest, designed for children aged 3–5.5 as part of Turo’s Tales / Kalqy Game Center. The forest has fallen silent: the baby birds are waiting inside their glowing eggs to speak their very first word, but a letter is missing and they cannot hatch. The child’s role is to guide the correct Letter Egg into the missing space in each word so the baby bird can hatch, chirp its word, and bring song back to the forest. As words are completed, eggs hatch, the forest begins singing again, and the story continues visually — reflecting the child’s progress without ever surfacing a score, ranking, or timer.
Interaction model
Children guide a glowing Letter Egg directly with their index finger, which acts as a magical pointer. The finger guides the Letter Egg across the next scene into the missing space in the word — a simple drag-style touch interaction consistent across all difficulty modes, so the underlying gesture never changes, only the challenge of reading the word does. With camera assist, we capture the gesture using body-landmark tracking, with poses, holistic poses, movements, eye movements, pinch and more.
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