Major Update: Version 2

At the start of January (2026), I launched my online store called The Wayward Melody.

I had been creating all sorts of projects for years (books, games, music, etc.) and thought it was time to sell them all in one place.

I had also rebelled against our terrible systems of education for years and thought it was time to show that everything can be taught in better ways (using games, stories, etc).

These two ideas came together in a general online store with a slight emphasis on education / educational resources.

The more I worked on the store, however, and the more I talked with those working in education, the more I realized the error of my ways. I took a step back and looked at what I had made more critically, and realized why nothing was really selling so far.

If you were a teacher (or a parent looking to homeschool), you would probably not use the store. Because it’s set up as a general store (that also sells my other work), it doesn’t scream “educational store”. There’s no easy curriculum to follow, no single button to find the exact resource you need for a topic, none of the usual signs that teachers will be looking for.

On the other hand, if you’re just looking for something non-educational (just a game to play, a book to enjoy, whatever), you also would probably not use the store. You would have to wade through a large pile of educational products that mean nothing to you. You’d read the words “educational resources” and think you were in the wrong place.

In other words, it’s a lose-lose situation. There’s no clear target audience; the store isn’t clear enough or good enough to be used by teachers. And I could see that now because of the experience gained while studying educational material and making it myself.

This mixture of target audiences also made it harder for myself to make decisions. Whenever it was time to pick a new project—a new “thing to make”—I was overwhelmed with options. Should it be educational? Should it not be? What fits my online store best? I basically always resorted to just making everything in curriculum order, but this means that the store has a lot of resources for grade 1 … and nothing for any of the later grades.

And so I decided to overhaul the store and its marketing.

Curriculum First

The question became: What’s the first thing a teacher/parent will need? And how can I make sure they find this store and will use that?

For many people, the first (and biggest) question is about what they should teach. A teacher most likely gets directions from the school or from expertise, but a parent trying to homeschool (for example) will struggle to pick the right topic to discuss every day.

In other words, I wanted the store’s front page (and general design) to clearly provide three services.

• A full curriculum. Easy to see when each topic should be taught, easy overview, easy reference at all times.
• An easy way to go backwards/forwards through this. In other words, once the curriculum defines “first you learn numbers, then you learn addition”, the website can provide big buttons for you to navigate through all the resources per topic.
• A tool for picking topics/resources. Users should be able to pick a topic (“today I wanted to do something with History”), and the website generates a nice bundle of resources for you to try (“we suggest THIS book, then THESE puzzles, and then THIS game”).

It should be incredibly easy for anyone to get started teaching, because the website makes all the other decisions for you.

This also means that any non-educational stuff is not shown or mentioned on the front page (or other major pages). It’s still on the store, but it’s more like “bonus content” for those looking for it. The curriculum is the main thing and the main focus.

In hindsight, I should’ve done this from the start. Of course I should have! Much clearer, much more focused, much more usable. But, well, you live and you learn.

Notes about creating the curriculum

When I started designing this store a year ago, I created a document with the general topics (language, math, etc) and the general steps I wanted to take.

I tried to research what the “official” curriculum was for several major countries, but that’s pretty much impossible. All countries have are very vague “guidelines” in a 200+ page PDF document. You’d think that having so many pages means the curriculum is defined in gruesome detail, but all the rules say are things like “Students can understand texts longer than 500 words now” or “Students understand the implications of historical events”. Like, what? How do you even test this? What is “understanding”? When is it enough? Which historical events!?

The “summarized” lists of topics that many schools and educational institutes make available online have been far more useful. They allowed me to double-check my own thoughts, to add some things I missed, or to make me realize a topic should be moved to a later level.

Having said that, my view on education is obviously different. The entire idea of the online store—as will be confirmed in later paragraphs of this article—is to provide better education that fills gaps.

For example, schools should spend way more time teaching physical practical skills. We live in a physical world, you need to know that stuff from a young age.

They should spend more time teaching about money and finances. Again, this will be a major part of anyone’s life, always, so I want to include resources about it and I want to include them early.

This eventually led to some massive changes in my overall plan.

• Mathematics was split into Mathematics and Science. Something like “logic” or “programming” (or even “money”) is often lumped in with mathematics, but it just doesn’t belong there. Mathematics is full enough as it is, and Science/Logic is also important and big enough to stand on its own.
• Physical was renamed to Skills. This major topic contains all that practical, physical knowledge that you’re never taught in school. I originally intended this topic to also contain subjects like physics for that reason. But now that we have Science as a major topic, and now that I’ve made a long list of all the practical skills that would be nice to include, it just made more sense to rename/repurpose it.
• Most Social/World/Science subjects start with a single general introduction. For example, “My First History” explains what history means and shows a general timeline of History, without ever getting into details. Once that introduction has been made, in later levels, I actually focus on the specifics (e.g. “The Roman Empire” or “Dinosaurs”).
  • Experience keeps showing me that this is the way when teaching anything. Humans learn by association. If you launch into Dinosaurs with students who have NO clue about any of history (around it), then they’re in for a hard time remembering or understanding any of it (long-term).
  • But don’t confuse “general introduction” with “generic”! You absolutely need something tangible to hook students in the first place. That’s why you want to start with a specific tense story about a specific historic event, for example. Once you’ve read that story, kids will be excited and eager to learn more “abstract” facts.

I tried to give each subject 5–10 different parts in every level. To keep it simple and streamlined, to prevent overwhelming myself or my users. A “part” simply means one topic, for example “Mathematics” has one part called “My First Subtraction”. But remember that this means books, puzzles, games, everything about that one topic. So it’s not one resource, it’s a bunch of them revolving around the same topic.

This does require shuffling some things around. Bundling things that are usually taught much further apart. But experience tells me that’s the right call.

At this point, those specific topics and their order from Level 3 onwards are not set in stone at all. I just wanted to fill out the curriculum completely, once, and had to put things in some order. For example, it really doesn’t matter if someone learns about The Roman Empire before Dinosaurs … or vice versa.

My only problem with my curriculum setup is the searchability. Because I simplify and bundle things together, teachers can’t just search for some highly specific topic/exercise and find exactly that. It will be part of a bigger whole instead.

After some thinking, I decided that this is far from ideal, yes, but it’s not so bad that I want to change things. All the other providers of educational tools use the exact same highly-specific steps in their curriculum—they clearly read that 200-page government curriculum PDF and copied it—and I hate it. This is one thing that sets my work apart and that, I feel, is a massive improvement and the way forward.

Some technical notes

Read this section in case you’re interested in how this change worked behind the scenes. You can skip this if not.

Products used to have a precedes property. I could list the products coming after this one and calculate a dynamic ordering like that. For example, a game about NUMBERS would precede a game about MULTIPLICATION.

There are pros and cons to this system.

• PRO = It’s a freeform way to get a “curriculum”. I merely need to link a product to another one, and the website could automatically build a chain of buttons leading you from the first topic to the last one.
• CON = This is expensive to calculate. The website needs to figure this out, which makes building the website each time take 10x longer.
• CON = This requires setting something on every product (that I want to be “sorted”).
• CON = It’s not needed anymore with the new approach :p

In the new system, the curriculum is NOT defined in individual products. Instead, it’s defined in a single data file.

• That file simply has a list of IDs for topics, in the correct order. For example, math: ["my-first-numbers", "my-first-addition", ...]
  • It has the full curriculum as I see it now, until the end of high school basically. But the later topics are likely to change and be expanded once we get there.
• Every educational product has a spell property that’s set to the right topic. (This was already the case, so no more work was needed here.)
  • In case a product has multiple spells, it defaults to the first one listed when calculating order.
  • This also meant I had to go back to older products and ensure the first spell listed is actually the most relevant one.
• Now I can simply read this data file to show the full curriculum in a nice overview page.
• And on specific product pages, I can easily calculate the spell BEFORE and AFTER our current one, and provide buttons to go there.
• (And when someone uses the “What should we teach today?"-tool, I can also simply read this data file to display all topics to choose from.)

Creating the curriculum in one (huge) file wasn’t that much work, because I’d already figured out the general topics and their order when I started the shop. Actually using it all throughout the website required massive changes, of course.

Marketing & “Findability”

A second issue with my old approach is that people will not find my store if they search for the usual educational keywords. Because, well, the store was just a general store that happened to have a lot of educational products! Google wouldn’t classify it as “educational games”. It probably would not show up anywhere as such.

I needed to actually use those keywords everywhere and market the entire store as such.

When I say keywords, think about words like “educational games” or “gamification (in education)” or “serious games”.

I had planned to start marketing the shop. My planning believed I would have enough content (and fixed any bugs/mistakes/errors) after 6 months, and so I planned to start marketing the store in the right subreddits and on social media and everywhere else.

But the moment I started work on this, I realized just how unmarketable the store was in its current state. I wrote some nice description to post on reddit, and I just couldn’t find anything to say. I couldn’t honestly recommend my store to teachers because of the lack of curriculum. I couldn’t really say it sells serious games if the word isn’t even mentioned anywhere on the website.

This moment also played a role in making me realize I needed to rethink the entire store.

In practice, this change came down to …

• Adding links and references to the keywords I mentioned. I used them in the website’s description/tagline, I added a bunch of relevant text to the footer of the website, I made sure to more strongly connect the words to my store.
• I wrote articles about these topics. I have a lot of thoughts on this anyway, so I simple wrote them down as nice articles in the “library” of the store. For example, an article about the term “serious games”, an article about “gamification”, and so forth.
• Reframing a lot of things. I’m always sad when I realize (again) how important this is. People are so susceptible to how you “present” something. It’s literally the same thing, just presented in a different way, and it can make a world of difference.
  • For example, instead of “Topics to teach”, you can say “What are your student’s interests?” It changes teaching from some boring thing imposed upon you, to feeling like you’re really helping your students and finding the right thing for them.
  • Another example: instead of “Your homework for today”, you can say “What shall we explore today?”

Unique Selling Point

The one thing I struggle with the most is unique selling point.

What is my unique selling point? Well,

• My curriculum includes books, games, puzzles, quizzes, escape rooms, and more to teach all topics.
• My curriculum is based on what science actually says works best and is most healthy (enough exercise, almost nothing is digital, etc)
• My curriculum treats students/kids as living beings instead of slaves, giving them freedom and joy while learning.

But … how do you EXPLAIN this? How do you communicate this immediately to anyone who finds you?

I’m still looking for some sort of one-liner to show in big bold letters and repeat everywhere. Something like,

• “Help students blossom instead of wither”
• “The world’s first school curriculum made of games.”
• “Education that understands learning and fun are the same thing.”
• “Effective education for all.”
• “A new generation raised on a curriculum of games.”
• “Playful education that works for you and the student.”
• “No tracking, no tests, no nonsense—children are not numbers.”
• “Learn from social real-life experiences like cooperative boardgames.”
• “No ads, no subscriptions, no screen addiction. Teaching the natural and healthy way.”

Website Design

Due to the curriculum change, the front page of the website was overhauled naturally. It used to have a short description of the store, then a list of categories and topics to pick from, then a list of the latest products (and some funny reviews from famous Fantasy characters to liven it up).

Now, when you land on the front page,

• It immediately pulls you into the curriculum. “What do you want to teach today?” (And a smaller button to access the full curriculum.)
• It shows that unique selling point (tagline, quick list of major benefits, etcetera).
• Then it shows the different categories, but one by one and with a description/example. (To naturally explain the idea of the store, nudging you from boring textbooks to games. Much better than a flat list of category names that doesn’t mean much to people.)
• And then it shows latest/random products for people who are just clicking around and exploring.

This “nudging” towards better education became more prominent in the new design.

• Every product has a big section saying something like “Want to teach this topic even more effectively? Try this product from the next category!”
  • For example, you’re looking at the standard teaching resource for numbers, then at the end you get “Want to test student’s knowledge? Try the numbers QUIZ.”
• It’s very straightforward to implement: I wrote some default texts to display there, and it just auto-selects a random product from the next category (in order).
• But it yielded massive results! People click through. People are naturally nudged away from boring textbooks and towards better stuff, exactly what I originally intended.

Besides that, I wasn’t happy with the overall visual design. I only spent a few days on it anyway, right when I started this experiment. (My folder for it is still called webshop-test :p Should rename that at some point, because the store hasn’t been a “test” for a while now …)

• I wanted to replace the AI placeholder banners, but never got around to it.
• I wanted to add more playfulness and color to clearly signal this is educational stuff for kids. (Similarly, the default theme should probably be LIGHT instead of DARK.)
• A bit silly, perhaps but I needed to communicate to viewers that there are multiple images per product. After watching someone use the store, I realized they completely missed the fact that you can click the previous/next image.
• I wanted to display relevant data in more places.
  • For example, the old product summary didn’t display its TOPIC ( = spell) or its PRODUCT TYPE. (Partially because I didn’t have that full curriculum set up back then.)
  • The new summary actually tells viewers “This is a PUZZLE GAME to teach MY FIRST NUMBERS”
• Similarly, I wanted to turn some textual lists into images.
  • For example, the “related products” at the bottom of each product is just text right now + the icon of the product’s category. But when all you see “Rainbow Express” … how could you know what it is? If you’re actually interested in that product?
  • It makes it easier to understand at a glance, all products have images anyway, should’ve done this from the start.
• I added the search bar absolutely everywhere. Most people will be searching for some very specific thing, and now they can just type those keywords and find all matching results.

As of this time, when this article is published, I haven’t completely overhauled the visuals yet. I’m still figuring out what I actually want the “look” or “branding” to be. So one day I’ll do a bigger visual redesign, let’s call that version 3 of the store.

The current design is okay, just a bit bland.

Free Resources

A lot of my ideas and works in education are quite different from what most people know or expect. And when something is that “different”, you need to do more work to explain what it is and convince people to give it a try.

Additionally, I am not some big name or big brand that people will blindly trust. Nor am I willing to throw away my moral compass and make ridiculous claims to gain people’s trust.

So, after feedback and market research, I had some more realizations.

• I needed to let visitors “demo” or “try” my products.
• The plan was always to make as many products as possible free. But when I looked at it, more than 95% of the store was actually paid.
• At the same time, many paid products had a very low price. The kind of price that doesn’t signal quality or confidence, and which isn’t high enough to compensate for the free stuff (and lead to profit).

And so I made my approach more explicit.

• I made way more products completely free. The paid ones became more expensive, such that no paid product has a price tag below €5. (Most of them are closer to €10 and €15.)
• I created a dedicated page, linked everywhere, to easily view all free resources. I explained the store’s principles and subdivided the resources in different ways (to make picking one even easier).
• I added a demo tag that I can put on products. This way I can explicitly make demo products and easily list them all.

As the update launches, not all product types have a free demo product yet. Even though a “free demo escape room” can be much smaller and simpler than the full one, it still takes time to make one ;)

But I’ve been able to tag enough products—which I think are “representative” of what clients can expect—to fill up this page.

In hindsight, as always, I should have done this from the start. This page just makes sense. Free resources will be the first thing people look for, and now they can easily find them. They allow people to see what the store is all about and start to trust it or tell others about it. And my wild ideas and inventions (such as “one button games”) simply need a demo to make people understand what they mean.

After making this page, it became much easier to convince myself that every topic needed one dedicated demo product for people to try.

Product Development

I’ve just explained the major changes to the website, or to the “public version” of the store. But what about behind the scenes? What about my big plan, the products I make, and more?

I’ve tried to create things in order. Start with the very first topic, in your very first year of school, and move on from there. Makes sense, right?

The issue is that it takes a lot of time to make everything for a single topic. To write a story about it, create a puzzle, create a game, and so forth. It takes too long to completely “finish” that one topic. You get burned out and deny yourself the opportunity to work on something more important or that you’re more interested in.

I asked myself: does a topic need to be finished before I can move on? Does it really need something in every category before I can allow myself to move on?

And the answer is: of course not, silly Tiamo.

Now that a clear curriculum lives at the center, there’s only ONE type of product that MUST exist in each topic: the “Teachers” product. It’s what people will look for first, it’s what “anchors” the whole thing. Anything else can be added later if needed.

And so, from now on, I allow myself to jump ahead a bit. To do what works best in the moment (for whatever reason), instead of sticking to the old rigid ways.

The “Teachers” products (which are your typical textbooks/worksheets/printables used in typical schools) will be made mostly in order. But I can make games, or write stories, for different topics whenever I feel like.

To give a specific example: numbers and letters. The past year I’ve been creating resources for kids who can’t read or do math yet—for the stage before that. And I’ve been annoyed many times about the fact that I can’t use numbers or letters. I’d get this amazing idea for an educational game with numbers, but I’d have to shelf it for now because I hadn’t reached that point in the curriculum yet.

When I finally had this better structure/approach, I breathed a sigh of relief and could finally make stuff that assumes the student can read or count (at least a little bit) :p

Conclusion

As usual, I’m annoyed that I always do things completely the wrong way the first time, and had to spend a lot of time overhauling the website.

But I’m also glad that I’ve identified why the store wasn’t really working. These changes make it much easier to use, to market, to explain to people what it is, and to convince people to give it a try.

The new approach to development also gave me the energy needed to get going again. I had fallen still for a bit, because my to-do list said I had to make all these things for the early topics (before they were “completely finished”), and I just did not feel like doing it (or, rather, that it was worth it right now). Now that I could jump ahead to some more advanced topics that interest me more (at this moment), it’s easier to keep up the pace.

Those were my thoughts and explanations, give the online store a try if you want, there are many free resources too ;)

Tiamo