Rosie's Bakery

A cozy iPad game built for my six-year-old daughter, where running a pretend bakery quietly teaches real math. Kids read the order board, measure ingredients with fraction cups, scale recipes up and down, cut cakes into fair shares for party guests, and count up change at a play-money register. Every treat is a math lesson in disguise.

The Challenge

Fractions and money are usually taught with worksheets, and my daughter wanted nothing to do with those. The game had to make halves, thirds, and quarters something you pour, cut, and frost, stay gentle when she got an answer wrong, and be a place I could hand her without worrying: no ads, no purchases, no data collection, fully offline.

The Approach

Built as a SwiftUI app over a pure Swift package that owns the game rules: fraction arithmetic, deterministic daily order boards, a recipe scaling system, and an eight-level money ladder that advances as she gets stronger. Measuring is drag-and-pour with visual helpers that show why two quarters make a half. Narration is pre-rendered voice audio with on-device text-to-speech as fallback, so pre-readers can play everything. Full VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, and Reduce Motion support.

The Results

Fifteen recipes, daily order boards with regular customers, birthday parties with cake cutting and decorating, a working cash register, and a wardrobe of outfits to earn. Tuned through nightly playtests with the toughest critic I know: the six-year-old it was built for. Now headed for the App Store Kids Category.

$The measuring bench: pour flour with fraction cups until the jug hits the fill line exactly.$