Uplift K12Game Design, UI/UX & Curriculum Platform System
Oct 2023 – Oct 2025
Year
Brand Identity · UI/UX · Motion Branding
Discipline
7 deliverables
Scope
2 sample games to a 270+ game library, plus sole ownership of the platform’s UI/UX, over two years
2 samples → 270+ gamesbrand-matched first at 50, then a full interactive math library across grades K–8
Took over platform UI/UXfrom a bootcamp-hired team: dashboard, login and shared whiteboard rebuilt from scratch
Built in Adobe CaptivateJava and occasional C++ for the interactive logic, CSS carrying the visual layer
20-game physical editionbox dieline, cover, cards, manipulatives and an instruction booklet
Two years, two rolesan 11-month contract, then a freelance creative-director partnership until it closed
CASE01
What they came with
In 2023, Mehul Shah (Product Manager at Uplift K12) hired me through Freelancer.com to bring a set of 2D educational math games in line with the platform’s brand identity. I delivered two sample variations first; once those landed well, the ask expanded to 50 games needing the same brand treatment.
The games converted cleanly, but the wider platform had an unresolved problem. Uplift K12 is a funded home-schooling math platform built around a teacher-led whiteboard tool: voice commands, an in-platform calculator, games embedded directly into live sessions for K–4. A bootcamp-hired design team had already built the UI, but the brand’s playful colour system was being applied decoratively rather than structurally, and the interface was hard to navigate for the students and teachers using it live.
CASE02
How I built it
Mehul asked me to take over UI/UX entirely. I rebuilt it from scratch, treating the brand’s colour and identity system as architecture rather than decoration: the dashboard, the login flow, and the full teacher/student experience, around how a class actually runs in real time. As it matured the bootcamp team was phased out and I owned UI/UX from that point.
The platform had to support a teacher deciding in the moment what a student should do and how: raising hands, running voice commands, opening a shared whiteboard where both sides could write, draw and drop straight into a game mid-lesson. All of it had to stay legible for a young student while giving the teacher full control.
CASE03
What shipped
Six systems came out of the two years, each one its own build rather than a variation on the last.
Game design & development
The 270+ games were never one repeated template. Racing games where players solve equations to advance, puzzles, matching and connect games, spinner-and-board games, card decks, each built for a specific grade from Kindergarten through 8th and a specific topic, from addition through fractions, geometry and early algebra, all searchable inside the platform’s library. I built every one in Adobe Captivate, with Java handling the interactive logic and CSS the visual layer.
Platform UI/UX & class management
The platform also needed a teacher-facing system to run a class day to day: a dashboard to add classes, manage each section individually, and control access with lock/unlock permissions per lesson. I organised lessons into playlists (an ordered sequence of activities, each with its own thumbnail, duration and description), so a teacher could see the shape of a whole lesson before starting it, or jump into any activity mid-session.
The interactive whiteboard
At the centre of a live session sat the shared whiteboard, built as a toolkit rather than one fixed screen: a full drawing and text set, an eraser for a single object or the whole board, a per-activity timer, a celebration system, invite-by-email, an end-session flow. Layered onto the same canvas were the virtual manipulatives (arrays, hundreds charts, ten-frames, number lines, equal-groups and rounding templates), plus auto-checking, read-aloud and auto-grading, so a lesson kept pace with a live class.
Quiz & card-game activities
A separate card-based quiz system let a teacher run live multiple-choice practice: a face-down deck, a four-option prompt, and a tracker for up to four learners at once. A parallel board activity, “Let’s Commute”, turned equation practice into a path game, a token moving along a route toward a destination as each answer was solved, giving repetitive drills a sense of progress a worksheet couldn’t.
Curriculum
Once the games and UI/UX were in a stable state, I moved to curriculum: a full K1–K4 math syllabus structure, built chapter by chapter, laying out how each grade’s material would be sequenced through the platform.
Promotional & marketing assets
From there the focus shifted to growth and selling: promotional videos, graphic assets, and a full pitch deck for the platform, produced alongside content specialist Renee Lakamsani, who handled written content within the brand system I directed.
Physical board game production
Later, Mehul wanted the platform’s strongest games in the physical world, sold as a standalone product. Not a repackaging job but a full production: 20 two-player games covering addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, each with its own board, cards and manipulative pieces, plus the box dieline, cover design, an instruction booklet with setup directions per game, and a QR-linked insert card tying the box back to the online platform.
Smaller graphic and branding tasks continued on an as-needed basis through to the end of the freelance contract.
CASE04
Where it landed
The engagement ran just over two years, across two roles. From October 2023 to August 2024 I was Game Designer & Web Graphics Designer on contract, building mathematics game assets for K–4 and shaping the platform’s visual identity alongside the development team. From September 2024 to October 2025 that became an ongoing creative-director partnership, leading multimedia content across the products and holding brand consistency as the design needs scaled.
Over that time the scope grew from a two-sample game request into full ownership of a funded platform’s UI/UX, its game library, its K1–K4 curriculum structure, and a physical product line, with Mehul as the client throughout.
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Uplift K12View on Freelancer.com
