Client:
Edheads – Simple Machines Activities - Partnering with various school systems in the United States, Edheads helps students learn through educational games and activities designed to meet state and national standards.

Challenge:
The Simple Machines project wasn’t just any project but was instead Edheads first educational web activity and would soon be appearing online. First impressions required the highest quality results. The goal wasn’t to simply create a textbook-quality reference to simple machines; it was to aid instructors in teaching an often difficult subject to youngsters, in a game-like entertaining environment.

Concept:
Living Children began the project by creating various sketches that would compliment the idea of a young user helping a robot character find 10 different simple machines in each of the four rooms of his house.

Solution:
Initially it was a bit of a struggle to conceive of more than 40 different examples of simple machines that were used in every day life, but Living Children and the Edheads team came through with flying colors. The Simple Machines experience is an enjoyable and entertaining adventure that continues to keep kids coming back for more. Not only has it enabled teachers to introduce the topic of Simple Machines in an easy to use web activity, but students now have the ability to print out score sheets, turning them in as homework assignments while keeping track of their progress along the way.

Subsequent Results:

• The Simple Machines Activities were user tested by over 300 elementary school students. Teachers claimed that their students rarely had the patience to stay on a single web site for more than 10 minutes, yet the average student-testing subject stayed engaged between 30 and 50 minutes.
  
• By virtue of the fact that this was Edheads inaugural web activity, Edheads didn’t exist as a publicly known company prior to Simple Machines. Despite the unknown web activity, within 3 months of launching the project, the Edheads Simple Machines site became and is now the #1 ranked simple machines web site on the Internet (based on a search for 'simple machines' on the Google Search Engine).
  
  
• Simple Machines now brings an average of 60,000 unique visitors a month to the edheads.org web site.
  
  
• Simple Machines has to date won multiple awards including the Yahoo Top 5 Site of the Week, USA Today Hot Site and CMYK Magazine Interactive design award.