Homework Club: Learning Shouldn’t Depend on What You Have at Home

When we started building Homework Club, one of the most important decisions we made was also one of the simplest:

It needed to work both online and on paper.

Not because we couldn’t decide which format was better.

Because there isn’t one format that is better for every child or every whānau.

Some parents want their children away from screens for a while. They want them sitting down with a pencil, writing things out, working through maths on paper, reading properly and having that traditional homework experience.

And there is something really valuable about that.

Pen to paper still matters.

But printing an entire learning programme isn’t practical for every household.

Some families don’t have a printer. Ink is expensive. Paper costs money. Some children aren’t regularly bringing homework home from school.

But they might have access to Mum’s phone. Or a tablet. Or a Chromebook or computer.

And that should be enough to get started.

Two formats. The same purpose.

That is why ICONIC GAMES Homework Club has been designed in two ways.

There is a printable version for children and whānau who want screen-free learning.

And there is an online version for children who can access a device and the internet.

They are different ways into the same learning.

The goal isn’t to decide whether digital learning or traditional learning is better. The goal is to remove one more barrier between a child and an opportunity to learn.

If you can print it, print it. Sit at the kitchen table. Grab a pencil. Write in the workbook. Scribble things out. Try again.

If you can’t print it, open Homework Club online. Use a phone, tablet or computer and learn there instead.

Neither child should miss out simply because their household is set up differently.

Built for learners in Aotearoa

Homework Club is aligned with the New Zealand Curriculum and brings together learning across areas including English, mathematics and statistics, science, social studies and technology.

But I didn’t want to build a pile of worksheets and call it Homework Club.

I wanted children to investigate things. To read. To think. To solve problems. To create things. To question information. To use what they are learning rather than simply filling in boxes.

And as learners get older, the programme grows with them.

The expectations increase. The questions become more complex. Learners are asked to reason, investigate, make decisions and take more ownership of their work.

Because homework shouldn’t only be about proving that you remembered something. It can also be about discovering what you can do with it.

And yes, there are games.

Of course there are.

We are called ICONIC GAMES, after all.

In the online Homework Club, learning comes first — but there are games built into the experience too.

I wanted there to be something enjoyable waiting on the other side of the work.

Not because children need to be bribed into learning, but because play is part of how we learn as well.

A game can ask you to react quickly, recognise patterns, solve problems, plan ahead, persist after losing and try a different strategy.

It can also simply be fun. Kids deserve some of that too.

So Homework Club can have serious learning, reading, writing and mathematics sitting alongside an arcade game. I don’t think those things have to contradict each other.

This is really about access.

The more I build ICONIC GAMES, the more I keep coming back to the same question: Who gets to use this?

It is easy to build educational resources around an imaginary household where there is always a laptop available, a working printer full of ink, plenty of stationery, subscriptions to learning platforms and an adult with enough spare time to organise everything.

Real households aren’t always like that.

Sometimes the printer has no ink. Sometimes there isn’t a printer. Sometimes the only available device is a phone.

Sometimes a parent desperately wants to support their child’s education but doesn’t know what work to give them. Sometimes a child simply needs somewhere to begin.

We cannot solve every barrier with one programme. But we can stop unnecessarily creating more of them.

That is what the printable and online versions of Homework Club are about.

Use what you have. Start where you are. Keep learning.

If that means a printed workbook and a pencil at the kitchen table, brilliant. If it means opening Homework Club on a phone, brilliant. If a whānau moves between the two depending on the week, that’s fine too.

The format isn’t the important part.

The child is.

Homework Club is also helping us build what comes next

There is another reason I have put so much into Homework Club.

It is helping lay the foundations for Mīharo Kura.

Mīharo Kura is the much bigger learning world I’m building — a curriculum-aligned computer game where learning won’t simply sit beside the game. It will be part of the world itself.

That is an enormous thing to build.

And I don’t want to build something that I think children and whānau need, disappear for years, and then come back with a finished product hoping I got everything right.

I would rather learn while I build.

Homework Club gives us an opportunity to do that.

It lets real learners use the curriculum content. It lets parents see what works at home. It lets us find the activities children enjoy, the instructions that confuse them, the things that are too easy or too difficult, the games they keep returning to, the places they get stuck and the things families wish we had done differently.

That feedback is incredibly valuable.

Every bit of it can help us make Mīharo Kura better.

That is also why Homework Club is free.

I want families to actually be able to use it.

Not just families who can afford another subscription. Not just people with a particular device. Not just people with printers.

Everyone.

Homework Club is free because I want it to be useful now, but I also want to learn from the people using it.

There isn’t a catch.

I’m not asking families to become professional testers or fill out pages of research.

All I ask, if you have the time, is that you tell me what you think.

Tell me what your child loved. Tell me what they hated. Tell me where they got bored. Tell me where something didn’t make sense. Tell me which game they played again. Tell me what you wish was there. Tell me if something simply didn’t work.

That feedback will help shape what comes next.

You can help us build Kura.

I think that is one of the most exciting parts of doing this in public.

Mīharo Kura doesn’t have to be designed entirely behind closed doors.

The children and whānau who use Homework Club can help influence the learning system that eventually sits underneath it.

Homework Club gives us somewhere to test ideas, learn, listen, change things and make mistakes while we are still building.

Then I can take those lessons into Kura: the curriculum structure, the difficulty, the instructions, the accessibility, the rewards, the games, the things children respond to, and the things they don’t.

Hopefully, that means Mīharo Kura will eventually be a much better game than it would have been if I had tried to figure all of this out alone.

That matters to me.

Because I don’t just want to build an educational computer game.

I want to build one that children genuinely want to play — and that parents, whānau and educators can see real learning happening inside.

Homework Club is one of the first steps towards that.

So this is an invitation.

Use Homework Club.

Print it. Open it on your phone. Put it on the tablet. Let your child try it.

Use one week or work through the whole programme. Take what is useful for your whānau.

It is free.

And if you can, come back and tell us how it went.

Because your feedback won’t just help us improve Homework Club.

It will help us build Mīharo Kura.

And one day, when children are exploring that world, playing the game and learning inside it, I hope some of the families who helped us at this stage can look at it and know:

We helped build that.