“Game of Missions” or the first season of a Bulgarian educational startup

Photo: Georgi Kamov

By Georgi Kamov

Episode 1 — “Stage Fright”

It was almost 11 PM, we still had a lot of work to do and Tsveti was definitely not cool about tomorrow’s presentation. We were discussing options, shifting slides back and forth, piling up new ideas only to get rid of them later because the whole thing seemed too complicated. It wasn’t turning out well. Things were not moving forward smoothly.

At one point we glanced at each other. Was she trying to convey something important? Yes. Was this a new and interesting point of view about parenting? Yes. Was it going to matter to the people in the venue — and to us as parents? Yes.

Then why overthink it? Let’s move forward. A couple of hours more and we’ll be ready.

We went to bed at three in the morning. And on the next day, on her first public appearance, Tsveti Kamova told the audience how design thinking turns problems into adventures (in Bulgarian only, sorry).

Today, two and a half years later we realized that this was the beginning. This was where it all started.

Episode 2 — “Gourmet Menu“

Sonny was bored. OK, how can a three and a half year old get bored? We had puzzles, booklets, we drew pictures, played outside and at home. And yet we saw that it wasn’t enough. Not only that — quite honestly, me and Tsveti were also getting bored after a few minutes of child activities. Yes, it’s a great puzzle, very beautiful and pleasant to put together, but when you put it together 3–4 times… that’s it, you just move on.

There is a great quote from Viktor Frankl: “When we are no longer able to change a situation — we are challenged to change ourselves.” We obviously had to shift our approach — not simply to seek new games and activities, but to find a way to “play the parenting game” differently.

We called design thinking for help — the method we were using to create change in companies and organizations. Yes, plenty of methods out there — and each of them is overpraised, unique and superior to others. Yet we saw that the process, tools and techniques of design thinking actually worked in practice. Why not try them out in the family environment at home?

OK, let’s pick something trivial and everyday — food. How can we make our meals more interesting? Sonny loves to help us prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner — can we turn this into a project? Project sounds like working with adults — let’s call it a mission.

Mission: Head Chef —Sonny will observe what he’s eating in the course of 5 days. Every evening we’ll draw and write down his daily menu on a piece of paper. On Saturday we’ll take a look at the meals, he’ll decide on the Sunday family menu for all of us and consult it with everyone at home. Then we’ll plan the groceries and on Sunday we’ll go shopping, cook the meals together and arrange the table.

Mission: Head Chef — the first Red Paper Plane mission that we shared as a free PDF download. It was July 2015.

Episode 3 — “6,000 RPM”

No one could stop us — we were firing on all cylinders. We’ve put out a mission every week during the last month and a half — Mission: Photographer, Mission: Reader, Mission: Cartographer, Mission: Meteorologist, Mission: Bartender (non-alcoholic drinks only). We would choose a profession or a human activity, come up with a challenge, play it with the kids and publish it online at the end of the week. It was super fun and engaging. We worked on the process of the missions and ended up with three stages — Discover, Choose and Create. We consulted child development specialists about appropriate activities in the missions for the 3–6 age group. We also iterated on the flow of the missions —they happened in the course of several consecutive days and we wanted to have 20–30 minutes per day as an optimal play time.

And then, for the first time I understood what the problem was with the rest of our games and child activities.

They were focused on the end result. With the missions that wasn’t really important — what mattered was the process. The fact that we were together. That we have a challenge and we have to solve it in a new way. That we don’t drift into a made-up world, but instead turn everyday things into an adventure.

And people started to notice. Our first true fans, who couldn't wait for a new mission to come out to play it with their children, are still with us — throughout all the iterations and the formats we experimented with. On top of that, it was free — you download, print and play. It wasn't your typical family product — not in the way we used to think of it.

Parents and kids really enjoyed immersing themselves in the themes and having something new to do together every week. It gave them structured time in the mornings, the evenings and the weekends. In the meantime, we were wondering if they realized that behind all the professions, occupations and challenges lies a powerful method and a whole toolkit for “innovation, creative confidence and problem-solving” used all over the world.

Was it all that important, anyway?

Episode 4 — “The Swiss Miss”

A new email at 9 in the evening was probably not good news. When I opened it, though, it was a moment to celebrate. A month ago, half-jokingly, we wrote about our missions to Swiss Miss, a very famous blogger. Tina (her actual name) wrote us back — she loved them and couldn’t wait to try out Mission: Astronaut with her son Tilo. She also shared a post about Red Paper Plane on her blog.

In the next few weeks our site visits surged with hundreds of percents. People started downloading our missions by the ton, other media outlets like Fatherly and Dads and Design wrote about us — and we got a bit mad that we didn’t even have a “Donate” button on our website.

The missions were taking bigger and bigger chunks of our time. Everyone was happy about them, but the bills kept coming as usual and Red Paper Plane wasn’t making any money. So, if there were to be missions in the future, we had to find a way to make a living out of them.

Episode 5 — “Arctic Chill”

Winter — the perfect time to engage parents and children with the Arctic. But why make a free mission again when we can bundle together many more things and create a product to sell?

Great! We put together Inuit fairytales, selected artworks from local painters, dug out various Arctic games and actitivites. We had a huge amount of material — ideal for a “mission in a box” to sell online with delivery. We worked non-stop for two months and, respectively, anticipated a proportional reward for our efforts. We were expecting tens, even hundreds of orders.

And we got nothing of the sort. There was no interest whatsoever, apart from 2–3 good friends of ours who wanted to show their support. Was everyone accustomed to the free missions? Was the product not that well thought out? Maybe the topic wasn’t interesting enough? Or the marketing campaign was to blame?

Episode 6 — “$+❤︎”

“Hello, Red Paper Plane fans! We are glad to inform you that, starting today, our missions are not simply instructions and a plan on a single page. They have become full-fledged PDF diaries with pages for each day of the mission, along with many extra materials.”

Well, we didn’t announce it exactly like that, but you get the point. With one small caveat — the missions were now paid products. We no longer saw them as a hobby, but as the bedrock for a future company.

Three months later, our bestselling mission was Mission: Astronaut. With two small caveats — (1) the missions we sold were a lot less than anticipated (even taking into account the Black Friday promotion we did) and (2) people apparently chose them according to the profession most attractive to them and their kids. Until now, parents played everything with equal excitement — now astronauts ruled the roost, while the vexillologists (the people who design flags — yes, we have a mission about that as well) were quietly sitting in the corner.

We had more media coverage than ever — articles in Bulgarian and foreign media, keynotes in big and small educational events, increasing interest from educators worldwide, startup awards. We were convinced that we are doing something new, different and meaningful. But we still had huge doubts about the way we offer it to people.

Let’s say it straight — we didn’t simply have doubts. We had no idea. We were two people dedicating most of our time to Red Paper Plane, and we felt that we needed at least five more team members and solid financial backing to make it work. We read a lot about entrepreneurship and startups, we consulted experts and seasoned professionals.

And yet something wasn’t working. And we didn’t know why.

Episode 7 — “Back to School”

Around that time, the first teacher got in touch with us. We knew that there were kindergartens, preschools and educational centers who played our missions. We had mixed feelings — the missions were designed for parents and their kids at home, not for educations with groups of children.

If we had missions for home, why not create ones that will be suited to the school environment? And we did exactly that — much more structured, full of interesting materials, with a number of activities aligned for each mission day and more design thinking tools and techniques for teamwork.

Everyone was talking about the importance of project-based learning (PBL) — yet no one was offering high quality ready-made projects. We believed (and still believe) that we have found a way to design projects that are engaging and meaningful for children, as well as easy and useful for teachers. On top of that, nobody was thinking about 3–6 year olds (all of the attention and focus on PBL and creative projects was on school-age kids, teens or college and university students), yet our missions were made precisely for this crucial period of our kids’ lives.

We shifted most of our work on Red Paper Plane to the (pre)school missions — those for parents fell behind. We couldn’t get our timing right and missed the beginning of the school year, and for the first few months we had a single client. Despite that, we were happy — we were able to prototype and test the missions in a variety of educational settings (including an elite Montessori preschool and a boarding school for underprivileged kids from various ethnic groups) and they worked really well. The kids were really engaged in the process — as well as the teachers, who didn’t need any special training in design thinking or PBL to get the missions up and running.

Episode 8 — “Flying Sticky Notes”

We started getting thoughts about startup financing again — there, now’s the perfect time to get more people in the team (we were three at the time), to develop our products and raise the bar. But we didn’t want to — we were convinced that we will come up with a sustainable way to make money from customers and users, willing to pay for the things we do.

We created the missions with design thinking, but we also used the method to sort out our own affairs. We set aside two more months to interview parents, do research, cluster insights and observations, brainstorm new ideas and approaches, prototype and test them out. Our office walls were covered with a wallpaper of colourful sticky notes full of customer needs, problem statements, new products and services, client personas and journeys, accompanied by heated debates and discussions among us.

The whole process definitely moved us forward from our previous position. Yet we still had doubts we’ve found the best path forward.

We had this great format — a mission. More and more parents (and teachers) appreciated how unique and useful it is. We had missions for the home and for preschools & primary schools. We even tested out a new variation — short, 2-hour workshops with missions in companies and educational centers.

But we still struggled with our product offering and our business model.

Episode 9 — “Cards on the Table”

When NIVEA approached us, we already had an idea about a new physical product. Parents loved our Mission: Storyteller — a perfect candidate for a card-based storytelling game (actually, this is what parents were asking us — “Why don’t you turn it into a game, it’ll be great for us and as a gift!”).

We made a deal that the first edition of the cards will be together with NIVEA and co-branded for their autumn marketing campaign. In a few months, the cards were ready — three colourful thematic editions, reaching more than 3,000 families in Bulgaria. This was followed by our own pre-Christmas campaign at the end of last year, when we also managed to sell a good number of them to parents, schools and companies.

We were really happy — but this didn’t change the fact that the last mission for parents, which we’d put on our website (for free), was from February 2017. And it was already the end of November. So we started some small experiments — a different mission design, a new format with shorter missions for everyday use, some fresh ideas about ways to offer them…

We greeted the new 2018 by sending a newsletter with our achievements so far — 12 mini-missions, 24 home missions, 84 countries where people play missions, 400 kids playing our school missions, 4000 sets of storytelling cards sold, 12,400 views of our articles on Medium.

And, against the backdrop of a very tough year for both of us personally and professionally, our vision for the future finally came clear. We found out what we actually create, what is our value to people and what makes us different.

Season 1 — Recap

What did we learn from these 9 episodes from the life of Red Paper Plane — the project that started with a presentation at an educational event and continued with the ambition to change the way we learn, play and create with our kids from early age?

Here are some things I can share with you.

1. From the very beginning we decided that if we’re going to start an educational project, it will solve difficult problems in a much better way. We have a favourite scene from the first Ice Age movie, when the protagonists run across a group of dodo birds, trying to prepare for the end of the world. There is chaos, birds are running around in groups, everyone is busy working hard! One of them decides to explain the dangers of the imminent apocalypse and how the dodo have a bulletproof ingenious plan for salvation. The bird moves aside and reveals… three watermelons. Then Manny the mammoth delivers a line that perfectly portrays the “innovative” potential of many startups: “And you actually ended up with three watermelons…???!!!”
2. If you haven’t experienced a problem first-hand, it’s very difficult to find a good solution for it. We started with a need we had as parents — to do more meaningful and interesting things with our kids. If we were a group of students, creating the newest disruptive educational platform, it would have been much different — and I’m not sure we would have been more successful and better attuned to the needs of the people we design for.
3. We used to think that our superpower was design thinking. It turned out that we were wrong — a method, no matter how powerful and amazing, cannot attract people on its own. We found our superpower elsewhere —in the experience we create with our missions. A parent and a kid in the living room at home, a teacher and a group of kids in a classroom — all of them solve important, real problems in new ways, going through a process that helps them discover, think, discuss, ideate, choose and create. If it’s not an engaging experience, it won’t work.
4. Kids love the diaries from the missions — without them it’s hard for the small designers to imagine the mission itself. We didn’t need a shiny toy to get them engaged — they were perfectly happy with a few printed pages held together with a stapler. When we asked Sonny why is he so happy when we start a new mission, he responded: “I’m happy because we’re together — we learn new things, do new things.” The product is not important in itself — it matters only as part of an experience. That’s why we couldn’t sell a lot of missions when we offered them as standalone products.
5. Apart from a method, a structure and a set of tools to create the missions, design thinking gave us something else — the attitude that there is always a way to solve a problem, to find a solution, to try a different approach. It’s not a conclusion that comes easy to people who were taught their whole lives that a mistake is fatal, end of story. But it’s especially important when you realize that the tools and the method won’t really work, unless you apply them in real life — in everyday situations, in difficult moments, at home or in the office.
6. There is also a personal trait, without which we would never make it that far — perseverance. Attempting, failing, succeeding, then another attempt, then failing again — it was really easy to give up. We even discussed it a couple of times. Then we stopped, took a breath… and moved forward — with a lot of all-nighters, working weekends, cancelled vacations and moments missed, including with our own children.

Season 2 — Teaser

So, anyway — what’s the vision for the future we came up with? What’s coming next? Will there be new missions and how are they going to look like?

Read the next post, where we announce the start of our new program “Design Explorers”. And in the meantime, we would like to thank all the kids, parents, teachers, friends, fans, alpha and beta testers who walked alongside us and experienced the first shaky steps of Red Paper Plane. We can’t wait to show you where we are heading next.

Red Paper Plane is creating innovative learning programs with design thinking for kids
age 4–10 — ”Design Explorers” for the home and “Design Champions” for educational environments.