Designing and scaling a new kind of classroom experience for more effective learning

Company: Runner

Client: GoNoodle

Role: Creative Direction, Product Strategy, Product Design, UX

GoNoodle had proven that brain breaks helped students stay focused, engaged, and ready to learn, but scaling the platform meant expanding beyond its library of live-action videos. I partnered with GoNoodle to design interactive classroom games, then helped evolve the product strategy by introducing animated experiences featuring GoNoodle's own characters. By combining product strategy, experience design, and storytelling, I helped transform brain breaks from a single content format into a richer ecosystem of classroom experiences that contributed to GoNoodle's growth into a platform used in 83% of U.S. elementary schools.

The Challenge

GoNoodle is an education platform built around a simple but powerful idea: students learn better when they have opportunities to get up, move, and reset throughout the school day. Their library of brain breaks helped teachers improve student attention, participation, and retention by turning a few minutes of movement into a meaningful part of classroom learning.

As adoption accelerated, the next challenge wasn't simply creating more content. It was expanding the product into new types of experiences that could keep classrooms engaged while supporting different teaching styles and moments throughout the day.

Interactive games offered an exciting opportunity, but they also introduced entirely new design constraints. Every experience had to work with one teacher leading an entire classroom, be instantly understandable, encourage participation instead of competition, and fit naturally into the rhythm of a lesson.

At the same time, GoNoodle's Champ characters, which students unlocked through participation, existed almost entirely as static artwork. They were recognizable inside the product but had never become an active part of the experience.

The Approach

GoNoodle partnered with our studio, Naut Games, to explore how interactive experiences could expand the platform beyond video. As one of the studio's product and creative leads, I helped shape the overall strategy while leading the design of several experiences from concept through production.

Instead of borrowing mechanics from traditional games, we designed around the classroom itself. Every decision started with the desired outcome: getting an entire room of students moving, participating, and ready to learn again. That meant creating interactions that were simple enough to understand immediately, engaging enough to encourage repeated use, and varied enough to support different classroom needs over time.

As our work together evolved, I saw another opportunity. I created an animated proof of concept featuring one of GoNoodle's Champ characters to demonstrate how the platform's own IP could become a larger part of the product experience. That prototype led to a new phase of work focused on expanding GoNoodle's animation library, work I continued directly with GoNoodle under Runner, the studio I founded after Naut Games.

Working directly with GoNoodle, I adapted the Champs into fully realized animated characters and developed a growing library of original content, including choreographed follow-along experiences that complemented the existing live-action catalog while giving the platform a stronger and more scalable visual identity.

The Outcome

The work helped GoNoodle evolve from a platform centered primarily on live-action videos into a broader ecosystem of interactive games and original animated content. Teachers gained more ways to bring brain breaks into their classrooms, while GoNoodle's Champ characters evolved from static product assets into recognizable personalities that strengthened the overall experience.

The platform continued its rapid growth, eventually reaching 25.5 million children annually and becoming part of the daily routine in 83% of U.S. elementary schools.

The animated content helped establish a foundation for future character-driven initiatives and brand partnerships with organizations including Nickelodeon, Disney, Cartoon Network, DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Bros.

The biggest lesson was that products don't exist in isolation. They exist within the environments where people use them. Designing for GoNoodle meant understanding that the classroom itself was part of the experience, shaping every decision from the mechanics of a game to the pacing of an animated brain break.

“When you design for a real environment, the environment becomes part of the product.”