Leading Product Strategy and Design for GoNoodle’s First Interactive Games
Co-founding a studio, running quarterly strategy with GoNoodle’s leadership team, and shipping their first classroom games, a partnership that lasted nearly a decade.
Client: GoNoodle
Company: Naut Games, Runner
Role: Product Strategy, Cross-Functional Leadership, UX Design, Design Systems, Game Design
The Challenge
GoNoodle launched with a mission to get kids moving during the school day, grounded in research showing that short bursts of physical activity improve kids’ focus, behavior, and learning, not just their fitness. Their platform started as a small catalogue of live-action Brain Break videos, without any interactive layer yet.
I co-founded Naut Games, a mobile app and games studio, with two other Filament Games alumni (another designer and a software developer), and GoNoodle became our anchor client. GoNoodle wanted to add interactive games to the platform without breaking what made Brain Breaks work in the first place: near-zero setup friction for a teacher managing a full classroom, and something kids actually wanted to do, not something a teacher had to force on them.
The Approach
Our team flew to GoNoodle’s headquarters every quarter to sit with their product and leadership team, align on where the platform was headed, and translate that direction into what we actually built next. Day to day, we ran standups directly with GoNoodle’s own product team, not just inside our own studio, so nothing shipped without their visibility into it.
With two Lead Designers at Naut Games, we were able to double our capacity and develop two games at a time. We each wrote game design documents (GDDs), led creative direction, and designed end-to-end UX for our respective projects, titles like Ultimate Champ Training, Think on Your Feet, Mega Math Marathon, and Field Trip.
The Long Relationship
When Naut’s engagement with GoNoodle wound down, I proposed continuing the relationship with them directly. I shifted my focus from game UX toward character animation, storyboarding, and video production for GoNoodle’s channels, work that eventually became the foundation for my own studio, Runner. The company changed, but the relationship didn’t skip a beat. GoNoodle stayed a client for years, spanning animated series, sponsored content, and video production, and I went on to build out a large share of their animated content library, videos on GoNoodle’s YouTube channel that I animated have been viewed more than 65 million times combined.
The Outcome
After launching the new interactive games, classrooms using the platform had logged more than 3 billion minutes of physical activity on GoNoodle during the 2015 to 2016 school year alone, and the platform was used in 75 percent of US public elementary schools, reaching more than 10 million kids and 500,000 teachers every month.
A later independent study by SEG Measurement, done in partnership with Children’s Health, found that teachers using GoNoodle reported real classroom impact: 85 percent said it improved student motivation, 83 percent said it improved attention and focus, and 82 percent said it increased participation and physical activity.
Today the platform reaches more than 14 million kids and 650,000 teachers every month, and is used in roughly 80 percent of US public elementary schools.