A lot of brainpower goes into the development of any single Sifteo game. In fact, we generally believe the more brains the better, and try to welcome as much collaboration as possible. Since many of our users have great ideas about what games they’d like to play and how our system can better suit their imaginations, we like to reach out and connect with them, too.

But most people don’t realize that many of the minds at work on our games are very young. And I’m not talking start-up, Silicon Valley young, but like, elementary school young. At Sifteo, kids are taken very seriously as critics of our work. After all, they’re usually the most enthusiastic and active game players out there!

Some of us are lucky enough to have nieces, nephews, or kids of our own who are eager to test out the latest Sifteo games in development. But most of the very young people we work with hang out at the Innovation Lab of the Children’s Creativity Museum, where children get a hands-on experience with new technology, talk with tech professionals about their jobs, and experiment with the latest innovations.

We really appreciate this opportunity to work with Sifteo’s biggest fans. With the right kind of exposure to technology, we’ve seen students become inspired to pursue a curriculum that could eventually lead to a career in computer science or engineering. And of course, the insights of children at play in the Innovation Lab are tremendously helpful to our game developers, who are in turn inspired by the imaginations of even our youngest users.

“I didn’t intend for Matchination to be playable with 2 cubes; I thought it’d be too simple,” Sifteo Game Developer, Eric Liao, explains. “But I’d forgotten to restrict the game to 3 cubes or more, and then noted that a lot of our younger play testers at the Children’s Creativity Museum were having a blast with 2 cubes. Their engagement really helped me understand what works for different age levels. I immediately made 2-cube play one of the options in Matchination.”

Another Developer, Josh Lee, describes group dynamics in Sifteo game play. “During one of our earliest play tests, I put a set of three cubes down on a table in front of three girls. Each girl took a cube and claimed it as her own. I thought this would make the games unplayable—they were designed with a single player in mind! But the girls naturally cooperated and brought their cubes together to play Chroma Shuffle and Mount Brainiac like a boss (a three-headed, six-handed boss). It really opened my eyes to different forms of collaborative play.”

On the games development team, we’re excited by this congruity of values in our work and play—we have more success and more fun when we work together.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in having your children participate in the Sifteo PlayLab, please fill out our survey or contact emily@sifteo.com. In the meantime, feel check out ABC 7’s coverage of play time in the Children’s Creativity Museum!