New Phonics Update: Powered by Your Feedback!

Here’s what’s different in our early reading toy.

When we released Phonics back in July, we’d aimed to capture the best of this early reading method in our own Pok Pok style. With our goal of helping kids grasp learning concepts and not just rely on rote memorization, the phonics approach seemed like the perfect fit! It teaches sound-letter relationships so kids can develop a more solid foundation for reading by “sounding words out”.

However, after receiving feedback from our community online and observing how more of our little playtesters interacted with the toy, we realized a couple of things…

• 1. Spelling Confusion: While we wanted to build phonemic awareness, spelling words phonetically in this toy was confusing for some children. Enough so, that it seemed like it could cause them to question what they’ve already learned in standard spelling. For example, if they were proud to have learned the spelling of “train” already, seeing the phonetic spelling as “C-H-R-A-I-N” was jarring. 

• 2. Accessibility for Little Hands: We noticed that younger kids were not always able to interact easily with Phonics. While Pok Pok helps develop fine motor skills through tap and drag interactions, we realized that this is one toy that could benefit from being more forgiving about precision. Because Phonics is already more traditionally academic and structured, we don’t want kids to lose interest from frustration about this.

We thank everyone who offered their feedback about Phonics through online comments, DMs, and emails. While we can’t always make every change submitted about toys, we are grateful for your support in helping us bring more balance to releases like Phonics or when a similar process happened with Shapes! Making a kids’ app that’s the first of its kind is a process of dreaming up big ideas, doing your best to research and test before launching, but more importantly—learning from how kids actually play with it long after release. 

So, what’s new in this Phonics update?

• Spelling: The toy is now based on both phonetics and standard spelling! While the phonetics will be sounded out with audio when an object is introduced or you click a phoneme (letter), the spelling that kids see will be the standard version to prevent confusion.

• Accessibility: To help make Phonics more accessible for kids who are developing their fine motor control, we have increased some of the elements in size, allowed for more tap-based play, and changed the “valid touch area”, meaning kids don’t have to be as precise in where they’re fingers land. 

• New Words: Each upcoming theme has dozens of new words, and more have been added to the existing three worlds. Many elements also now have an adjective or verb associated with them. For example, you might see “muddy” next to the pig!

• New Upcoming Scenes: In this current update, we’ve added a new construction scene as we know many of our players love this theme and all the machinery that comes with it. There will also be two more coming with “Museum” arriving on October 16th, and “Medieval” on October 23rd.

We thank you all again for your continued feedback about the app. Whether it’s challenges with a release, something you’re noticing in your specific device, a toy idea, and more, we could not build Pok Pok without you!

P.S. You can use this link to prompt the update on your child’s device if the update has not happened automatically.

We’ve been so inspired by the unique approach of each child who plays with our toys and can’t wait to hear what families like yours think of this one. Receiving your feedback, videos and ideas for new updates is so important for the growth of Pok Pok so please say hello at hello@playpokpok.com or on social media @playpokpok.