The Toothbrush Training Game
Studio
Fun came first. Our early games were successful mainstream entertainment. Maybe, when you were younger, you played our Dinotopia, Gettysburg or Pie Jackers?
However, an indie studio can’t survive unless it finds its sweet spot. Twelve years ago, we found ours:
Play with purpose.
We are a small studio, but we are recognized as leaders in the rapidly emerging field of Game-Based Learning. We make games to help intelligence analysts and to help high school dropouts. We build games for big government science agencies and for a one room schoolhouse in Texas.
We are the experts at game-based learning. For each game, we work with experts in the subject matter.
Dental Science
Brush Up has been guided by several accomplished dentists, deeply experienced with children, and with industry innovators like Dr. Paul Warren of Procter & Gamble.
America only has one university research lab dedicated to Dental Hygiene. It’s a newly recognized discipline with only a few qualified scientists. We caught a rising star!
Joyce Downs Flores, MS, RDH taught thousands of kids to brush their teeth as a working hygienist. Now she is a scientist at Old Dominion University’s Dental Hygiene Research Center. She helped us turn Brush Up into a functional game that can help all dentists and children.
Child Science
Developmental Perception
Young children perceive a different world than we do. At Emory University’s Child Study Center, the Spatial Cognition Lab explores how children see and imagine space and how they handle tools. The lab’s principal investigator, Dr. Stella Lourenco, brings these insights to our team.
Biostatistics
Real science has demanding standards. Dr. Traci Leong helps us hold ourselves to such standards. She is the Lead Biostatistician at the Emory and Children's Pediatric Research Hospital. She oversees our experiments and analyzes the resulting data.
Traci’s daughter, Mylee has been our favorite formative test subject. And that's not all. As her dentist and her dad, Dr. Jonathan Dubin has watched Mylee play the game and helped refine its features.
Roots
Our Principal Dentist, Dr. Robert L. Jacobson, set up his first dental practice on the ground floor of this sunny old Staten Island house.
The office was bright and busy. Kids always love 'Smiling Bob'. His own six children lived upstairs. He hoped one of them would join his dental practice, but each followed a very different path. In fact, one went on to start a game studio.
Now the circle has come around, and Dr. Jacobson is working with his son, the founder of GamesThatWorks, and his grandson, the studio's chief technologist and their many talented colleagues to keep alive that spirit of happy, healthy childhood.
