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Educational Games & Stories for Kids

Lipa Learning was a Czech start-up with the goal of developing wholesome and educational mobile games for young kids—games that parents would feel good about letting their kids play. When I started, the company had developed about twelve or so individual apps, each teaching a different life skill. For example, Lipa Eggs taught primary colors and how to mix them to get secondary colors. Lipa Pirates taught simple shapes and how to trace them. But there was a lot of gaps to fill and changes to be made to how the company, its vision, and its apps were presented. That’s where a lot of my work came in.

I started as a copywriter, rewriting all of the app store descriptions to be more catchy, with keywords and better SEO. I rewrote the entire website copy as well and created blog articles for parents. It was a slow start—as the only copywriter, I had a lot of work revamping all of Lipa’s marketing materials. I created company slogans, product teasers, pamphlets, PowerPoint presentations for my bosses to present at conferences, and I worked closely with the Product department to develop and write the voice over text and scripts for the games and picture books.

After a couple of years, it was apparent that the scope of the company was larger than anyone had predicted. Everything we made was based on the Lipa Curriculum—an educational structure developed by our in-house Education Team. We had games, chapter stories, picture books, mini games, articles, and real-world activities like crafts, experiments, and games for kids to do outside the app. Lipa Land was the new and improved platform for all these different products. Everything was housed in a single app, which was much easier for me to present marketing-wise. As the company grew, so did the need for copywriting. Thus a full department was created.

My new position as Copywriting Manager felt like a huge step for me. I’d never led a team (albeit a small team of two other writers) and I’d never held a position where my opinion was the end-all, be-all opinion when it came to copywriting. I would assign tasks and make sure they were completed by the deadline. I managed the hiring of remote children’s authors to write stories for the app. I created writing workshops when other colleagues were interested in writing stories and needed to learn the ropes.

My ultimate accomplishment, however, was developing the “voice” of the company. This was a style guide describing how Lipa presented itself—the style of writing, the type of vocabulary, the do’s and don’t’s of copywriting, and examples and templates of all types of marketing materials. For example, if a writer needed to create a slogan for a banner, they could consult the guide and find that our slogans usually included words like “educational”, “learning”, and “fun”, or variations thereof. If a writer needed to write a picture book, they would find a template noting maximum word count per page, what reading level to use and what vocabulary words were included in that level, plot ideas, character ideas, and more.

Working as a Copywriting Manager taught me how to effectively switch between being a creator myself and a leader. I refined my teaching skills—I had run writing workshops in the past and worked at my college’s Writing Studio helping students with their papers—and had so much fun sharing my experience with fresh talent. When difficult situations arose with team members and their performance, I had to flex my leadership muscles and handle it with professionalism and compassion. There’s nothing I despise more than an apathetic, uninvolved manager. My goal was to be interested, present, and open at all times, though not “hovering” (another of my pet-peeves). I gave my team independence to express their creativity while making sure they stayed within the boundaries of the Lipa style and product parameters.

During my five and a half years at Lipa, I learned to adapt my writing style to many different mediums. Marketing copy is in itself a mountain of details. I completed an online university course in Marketing & Sales Writing just to prove to myself that I knew all its complex facets, from radio spot scripts to concise and catchy website copy. But it was the creative work I enjoyed the most. Writing stories for little kids is not easy. There were so many limitations, especially when it came to the plot. Our Curriculum had to be expressed in every story somehow, and I learned much more than I ever planned to about children’s early education and development! My research and study never ended, because I truly wanted to do the best job possible for those kiddos.

Thanks for reading this essay!