Why we made Wrenfield
A six-year-old shouts hello across the street to a friend, and the friend walks straight past. That is a small thing to an adult. To the six-year-old it can be the whole weekend.
What happens next is usually decided in a few seconds, before anybody has thought about it. The child decides the friend did it on purpose, or decides it does not matter, or decides to do the same thing back on Monday. And whichever one they pick, they mostly never find out that there were other choices.
Wrenfield is a place to find that out, a long way from the playground and with nothing riding on it.
What a child practises
Every problem in Wrenfield is worked through with the same questions, in the same order:
- What happened? The facts first: what somebody did and said, before anyone decides what it meant.
- How do they feel, and what shows you? A child reads a painted face and the moment around it, and has to point to the evidence, not just guess.
- What do you want? To find out why, to be left alone, to get your own back, for everything to be normal again. Wanting something and doing it are two different steps, and it helps to take them one at a time.
- What could you say? Three choices, written the way children really talk. The child picks one.
The order is not ours. It follows a well-known account of how children make sense of a social situation, first set out by the psychologists Nicki Crick and Kenneth Dodge: notice what happened, work out what it means, decide what you want, think of what you could do, choose one, do it. It is easy, for children and for adults, to jump straight from the first step to the last. The stories slow that down, one question at a time.
Why the choices have consequences
There is no score in Wrenfield. There are no stars, no ticks, no “great job”. When a child makes a choice, the story simply carries on, and they find out what their choice did.
We built it that way because a mark out of ten teaches a child to find the answer the grown-up wanted. A consequence teaches something more useful: that the words you choose change what happens to you and to the people around you. It also lets a story be honest in a way a quiz cannot. Sometimes the right choice costs something. Letting a thing go can mean a whole weekend of not knowing. Speaking up can be awkward before it helps.
So in every story, two of the three choices turn out well, in different ways, and one shows what it costs. Speaking up, asking, walking away, finding a friend and fetching a grown-up are each the right answer somewhere, because they are each the right answer somewhere in real life. Giving in is never presented as the answer. When a story lets a child simply go along with something unfair, it shows them what that costs.
And there are no villains. Each of the six children in Wrenfield is the one who gets hurt in one story and the one who gets it wrong in another. A child who has only ever been the one who was upset needs to see that the people who upset them are not bad people, just people who got it wrong; and a child who is usually the one in trouble needs to see themselves on the other side.
Why a village
It is hard to care about a stranger on a worksheet. It is easy to care about Omar, who is six and has just been put in goal for the first time, or about Kit, who moved here last year and hangs back until someone calls him over.
So Wrenfield is one small village with the same six children, story after story: a high street with a bakery, the rec, the school gate, the corridor, the bus stop in the rain, and the kitchens at home. The stories are short and each one stands on its own, but the children carry on between them, and a child who has met them before notices things a newcomer would not.
The pictures are painted, not cartoon-flat, because the thing a child is asked to read is a face. A face has to be worth looking at.
Safety, and screen time
Wrenfield is made for children aged 6 to 8, and it is bought by a parent or guardian. It is paid for once, up front. There is nothing to buy inside it and no advertising anywhere in it.
The app does not use the internet at all. It is built without permission to, so there are no accounts, no sign-in, no chat, and no way for anything a child does in it to leave the phone. The only thing it remembers is progress through the stories, and that stays on the phone.
On screen time, we made a few decisions on purpose. Each story is finished in one sitting. There are no streaks, no daily rewards and no counters that go down if a child stays away, because a thing designed to make stopping feel like losing is not something we want to hand to a six-year-old. When a story ends, nothing starts on its own: the next one waits until somebody chooses it. And a story is meant to be a starting point: the best part of it is often the conversation afterwards, about which way your child chose and why.
Who makes it
Wrenfield is published by SANAD Technologies LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, the company behind the free BrightKidz Library and brightkidzhub.com. It is a business, and Wrenfield is a paid product; we would rather charge an honest price once than pay for it any other way.
Wrenfield: Friends and Fallings-Out is the first set of stories. The skills it practises are the start of a longer plan of what children could learn to do with words, and the rest of that plan is work still to come.
If something in Wrenfield is wrong, or does not work for a real child, please tell us: hello@brightkidzhub.com. A person reads it.