Food Fight | Game
Categories:
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RoleExecutive Producer
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CompanyBrainPOP (Lego Group)
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SkillsInstructional Design, Game Design, Project Management
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Years2010-2015
Project Overview
As Executive Producer and BrainPOP’s first instructional designer, one of my core initiatives was to introduce interactive learning experiences to what was then a library of approximately 300 animated educational videos with no interactive components. To address this, I led the development of BrainPOP’s first educational game portal, curating top-tier interactive titles from leading educational game developers and aligning them with BrainPOP’s existing video content. This strategy expanded our platform into a more dynamic, participatory learning environment.
To demonstrate the potential of original interactive content, we created BrainPOP’s first game design studio and I directed the development of Food Fight, a two-player strategy game designed to teach students about ecosystems and interdependence through competitive, inquiry-based gameplay. The game was specifically designed for shared use in classrooms with limited computer access, allowing two students or groups to play together on a single device. Food Fight helped set a new standard for collaborative educational gaming, reinforcing my vision to integrate interactivity, accessibility, and curriculum-aligned design across BrainPOP’s platform.
Developed as part of BrainPOP’s GameUp educational games initiative, the game allows players to build and manipulate simulated environments by introducing species and testing how changes affect the ecosystem. Food Fight was one of BrainPOP’s first original games and served as a cornerstone for aligning animated video content with standards-based interactive learning.
Process
In my role as Executive Producer, I directed the full production lifecycle—from concept through post-production—of Food Fight and the broader GameUp platform. I worked closely with educators, game designers, and academic partners, including MIT and the Learning Games Network, to ensure the educational rigor of the content. My responsibilities included:
- Leading game design and user testing, ensuring age-appropriate gameplay and curricular alignment with science and life systems standards
- Creating a teacher-facing experience, complete with support materials and scaffolded learning activities
- Managing production schedules, team workflows, and quality control processes
- Overseeing the design of an embedded formative assessment system that tracked gameplay data and learning progress
- Supporting accessibility and UX across the experience, ensuring WCAG 2.0 AA compliance and mobile responsiveness
- Integrating SEO best practices and taxonomy structure across BrainPOP, the GameUp platform and the BrainPOP Educators portal
In addition, I led the curation and evaluation of 100+ third-party educational games hosted on GameUp, partnering with leading universities, nonprofits, and mission-aligned content creators. I also helped launch BrainPOP’s first mobile apps (iOS, Android, Windows), and created a global collaborative infrastructure to manage content across international teams in the UK, Mexico, France, China, and Israel.
Here are a few screenshots showing the basic game play:
Project Outcome
My team strategically designed Food Fight as an interactive complement to a series of our most popular animated shorts on; Food Chains, Ecosystems, Energy Pyramids, and Invasive Species. As with all of the games we created on BrainPOP, we created the game with an ecosystem of media-rich learning resources to support the game’s use in classrooms, including species cards, and a teacher portal with professional development videos, lesson plans, implementation tools and printable resources like the one below.
Food Fight became a classroom favorite, recognized for its ability to introduce complex ecological principles through experimentation and gameplay. It was widely used by educators to complement science units and support hands-on, inquiry-based learning. As a result of this and related initiatives:
- BrainPOP’s GameUp portal launched successfully with 100+ games, complete lesson plans, and curricular integrations
- My team scaled video production from 1 video per month to 3 videos per month, and produced over 200 educational videos, raising the total number of videos on the site to over 750 educational videos, localized into 5 languages for the UK, Mexico, France, China, and Israel
- I led alignment of all BrainPOP videos and supporting assets with national and state standards
- I led SEO and accessibility improvements that increased BrainPOP’s search engine referral traffic from 12% to 79%
- BrainPOP achieved adoption in over 25% of U.S. schools and grew into one of the most recognized brands in K–12 education
- The company’s growth and innovation contributed to its eventual acquisition by the LEGO Group
This project reflects my ability to lead cross-functional creative and technical teams, integrate media production with instructional design, and scale interactive content production, video production, and develop digital learning platforms that deliver impact across classrooms worldwide.