I just had an amazing experience in my son’s classroom. It is the last week of school before the summer break so my son’s teacher was looking for activities to keep the kids entertained. My son had been bragging to his teacher about Gametje for a while so the teacher was aware of what I did for work. I was lucky enough to be invited to show off the games this morning at the school.
Nervous?
It’s not every day you need to speak in front of others, even if it’s only a single classroom of children. I wasn’t worried about the platform keeping up with 23+ players in a single game. It has been performance tested well beyond that. I was more worried about speaking Dutch in front of 23 kids!
Luckily that was only a small percentage of the morning and it went pretty well. After giving the intro and getting them started, I could sit back, watch and enjoy the controlled chaos.
Reception
The hour went by in a flash. It was really fun to see their reactions and laughs, whether it was kids hiding their screens so their deskmate wouldn’t cheat or joking around about the funny drawings. I couldn’t hold back a smile when one kid blurted out the answer early in the round and everyone groaned 😁.
As a developer, I was pleased to see most kids could easily navigate the UI. A few even found the “secret” name and avatar change mechanic (which is definitely not clear enough as it stands now). When drawing, it was interesting to see whether they used the touch screen or the trackpad on the Chromebook. Both work without an issue, but the touchscreen definitely yielded better results.
Canvas Clash
For Canvas Clash, we had 23 players (including the teacher) in the game. I configured the game to only have one drawing per player, otherwise it would have taken too long. It took ~27 minutes to complete the game. Here’s a video of all the drawings from this morning:
Classroom Drawings
Overall the drawing game worked really well with the crowd. I had made a custom word pack just for this occasion so every word would be easy to understand for the 9-10yr olds.
Paka Paka
Paka Paka was the biggest hit. It is an animal sound game where you hear the sound of an animal and then need to click on the picture. Each Chromebook played the sound so you could hear the echoes of polar bear roars, puffin growls, and bird tweets around the classroom.
Paka Paka Leaderboard
My son was lucky to come out on top. He has played Paka Paka many times before so he had a huge advantage.
I couldn’t ask for a better review and play test of the games. The kids figured it out easily, the platform had no issues with that many players in a single game, and many laughs were had. Even the teacher had a great time! I think I earned my son a bit of social cred as well.
Up next?
All of this took place on the old platform code. After joining forces with my co-founder Guillaume in March 2026, we decided to give the whole platform a UI uplift. I have been hard at work on the new design for the last couple months. It’ll come with some brand new styling and also one brand new game. I’ll also port over almost all of the previous games to the new codebase. Currently shooting for an early/mid Fall 2026 release.