Family games that bring people, one household at a time, to a real forest

The problem

Nature restoration needs support from ordinary people, and most climate messaging puts them off. Adults scroll past it, and children are handed fear and graphs they can't act on. Buying that attention one ad at a time is expensive and rarely lasts.

Carbon Kids reaches people another way: through a family playing together. The games are the story of a real place, the forest Wovoka is restoring on Mindoro in the Philippines. When a round ends, the grown-up in the room is one scan away from the real project.

What we built

• The TV is the console and a phone is the controller. The TV shows a QR code, a grown-up scans it, and the phone becomes big buttons connected directly to the TV. There's no app and no sign-up, two kids can share one phone, and the phone stays joined from one game to the next.
• Five games about how a forest comes back. Seed Run turns a bare hill green. In Night Owl the phone is a flashlight you tilt. Daliyah's Dash was designed by a child from her whiteboard drawing. In Seedling Spreader you ride a forester's motorbike and bring native trees, coffee and bananas to farmers, which is how the real project works. Mangrove Splash is for members. Nobody loses.
• From the game to the real forest. After a round, the TV shows grown-ups a QR card that leads to the Mindoro project and its partners, and there's a tip jar for grown-ups. Children are never asked to pay.
• Forest Club without child accounts. Each month's letter carries a code word. Typing it on the TV unlocks new levels, so membership needs no logins for children.
• An Android TV and Fire TV app that wraps the same pages, with payment asks and tracking removed to meet the stores' rules for children's apps.
• A growth loop that learns. Social media accounts were set up by automation. Every platform and placement gets its own tracked short link, and the games report starts, finishes, players and scores. That shows which posts and ads bring families to play and which send grown-ups on to the project. Nothing is collected on the phone the child holds, and ad personalisation is off.

Where the AI is

AI coding agents built the games, the phone controller, the TV app and the tracking. The game sprites are drawn in code from the same file as the book art, so the characters always match. Account set-up and performance tracking run on automation, so a small team can treat each post as a small experiment and spend more on whatever brings families in.

How fast

The first game went live on the morning of 4 Oct 2026, and the other four were done by midnight, per the repository history. The tip jar, Forest Club and tracked social links followed over the next two days, with the TV app on 6 Oct. Book one, a comic for early readers, is in progress.

How this applies to your business