A road safety game that teaches the wrong thing is worse than no game, because a parent will trust it and repeat it at the kerb. So before any code existed I wrote down what the game must never do. Then I turned as many of those rules as I could into checks that fail the build.
The nine rules
- Only safe behaviour is rewarded. Stopping, looking, listening and choosing a safe place are the controls, and the only things that earn anything. There are no timers, speed scores, streaks or leaderboards. A points-and-leaderboard game tested in Hong Kong with 340 children did no better than a booklet, and a reward for speed would teach speed.
- Conservative rules, not gap judgement. The rule is “If anything is coming, wait”. Children under about 10 misjudge how fast vehicles are approaching, so the game never accepts or rewards a tight gap.
- Every rule is traceable. Each rule carries a code for its source: HC (Highway Code), NS (National Standard for cycle training), KC (Kerbcraft), TS (Know Your Traffic Signs) or RO (RoSPA guidance, marked as advice, not law). A build check rejects a rule without one. If I can’t trace something I flag it and don’t ship it.
- Rehearsal, not a substitute. The copy never implies the game alone makes a child road-safe, and the game is never designed for use at the roadside.
- Rules, not places. Streets show feature types like a zebra, a parked van or a school gate, and never a real place. A child shouldn’t learn that one particular crossing is always safe.
- Left-hand traffic. Most borrowed ideas come from countries that drive on the right. A test checks that on every two-way street the near lane’s traffic comes from the child’s right.
- Correct only what a source prohibits. The game never marks a child wrong for something the law permits.
- No harm imagery. No crashes, injuries or near-misses. A correction is a calm retry with a question.
- Rehearsal, never readiness. No “passed”, licence or “ready” framing anywhere, and a test scans every line of copy for those words. Kerbcraft bans pass certificates for the same reason: families read them as permission for a child to travel alone.
What the game will correct
Feedback has three tiers.
- Rewarded: the taught choice. Standing back from the kerb with a clear view both ways, looking, listening, and waiting until nothing is coming.
- Accepted with a short explanation: something the Highway Code allows but isn’t the taught way. Looking in a different order, standing right at the edge of the kerb, or crossing near a crossing without using it. The game says why the other way is better and doesn’t mark it wrong.
- Corrected: crossing while anything is coming at the youngest stage, crossing from a spot with no view of the road, stopping in the road, crossing without looking, and crossing on a diagonal. A correction takes the child back to the step before the mistake with a question, such as “Can Pip see down the road from here?”
“Prohibited” has a definition. It means a source says MUST NOT, or uses an explicit “do not” or “should not”. Writing that definition down showed up a gap during the source review. Highway Code rule 7D allows crossing when there is a safe gap, so correcting a young child for crossing with a distant car doesn’t rest on the Code at all. It rests on a hazard in the log: children under 10 can’t reliably judge speed. A build check now makes every correction name either a hazard or a source text containing a prohibition.
At the older stages the game silently tolerates a crossing when a single vehicle is far away on a slow road. It never rewards it, and it never ranks it above waiting. The margins for that are in the hazard log, under H15.
A look has to see something
Kerbcraft’s own evaluation found that trained children often stood where they couldn’t see down the street, turned their heads anyway and said nothing was coming. A game that credits any head turn would train exactly that. So the game credits a look only from a spot with a real view of the road in that direction. The engine works the view out from the geometry of the street, including where a parked van stands, and not from a label someone typed. How that works is on the build page.
Ages, stages and training are recommendations
Modules are grouped into three stages, each with an approximate age range.
| Stage | Approximate ages | Walking | Cycling |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 6 to 8 | Safe places, crossings, parked cars, junctions and being seen | Getting ready to ride, setting off and stopping, looking behind, and sharing paths with people, all in traffic-free places |
| B | 8 to 9 | Reversing vehicles and buses, shared paths and cycle lanes | Crossing roads with a bike |
| C | 9 to 11 | No new walking modules | Riding on the road, towards Bikeability Level 2 |
Cycling starts at stage A with control skills away from traffic. Cycling near roads is introduced at stage B, and riding on them waits for stage C. Two bonus modules, using a push scooter and being a car passenger, are both at stage A.
A child’s stage is set by the parent on that child’s profile and never worked out from age, so the ages above are a guide and nothing more. Nothing is locked by age, by walks logged, or by whether a child has done Bikeability. Bikeability Level 2 is strongly recommended for stage C and not required. The programme can recommend and can’t enforce, and the Highway Code leaves it to the parent to judge when a child can manage a road.
Privacy
There are no accounts, no analytics, no cookies beyond what the page needs, no ads and no third-party scripts. Progress is stored on the device and nowhere else. A backup file the parent can export is the only way it moves.