Morphun – ThinkPlay International

Client

ThinkPlay International –  the owner of the Morphun brand – is a company that produces educational construction toys for children. They can be used individually, at home, as well as in schools to enhance the learning process in, for example, English, Math, and generally the STEM-related fields.

ThinkPlay has been managed by various members of the Simonds family – a large, well-respected family from England that traces its roots back hundreds of years. Over the years, we have worked on different projects with different family members, finding common ground with them, regardless of age, role in the company, and their previous experience with IT.

Problem

While their products belong to the real, offline world, the influence of information technology on conducting business became stronger and stronger as the years went by. Different facets of the business required modernization and digital transformation to keep up with the strong demand for their products. On the other hand, ThinkPlay was looking for new, modern ways to improve the brand’s overall experience.

What we did

Our work started with a small project, a collection of minor modifications to Morphun’s website. Once we got validated as a trustworthy vendor, a new, much more exciting challenge appeared – the Morphun team tried to bring the digital experience to their base products. As a result, an educational game called Wordphun was proposed. The bricks with letters on them were transformed into the digital world, so kids could learn how to join them to learn new words.

Initially, this game was attached to some of the brick sets using CDs, so kids who received such sets could play with Morphun bricks on their computers, but soon Morphun and Makimo realized that such games have much more potential. Thus, the concept of morphun.education was developed. It was one more step forward – since Morphun was already present in the digital world, now it was time to go from offline games to an online, educational game platform – not only for individual clients but also for schools!

Morphun.education became the most prominent project developed for Morphun. With two separate versions – MVP and the complete platform, it was developed for over five years and has been supported ever since.

Besides projects related closely to end users, i.e., kids, their parents, and schools, we also worked on valuable software for digitalizing business processes for ThinkPlay’s sales department. We created Morphun ERP used, e.g., for product information management, the structure of products, and relationships between similar types of products. It has been designed for future integration with the rest of the production processes.

Last but not least, our relationship with the Simonds family has been so deep and unique that we helped them develop a site for their family history and reunion.

Makimo have done several projects for us and we are delighted with the results. I am looking forward to working on other projects. The results have all been excellent.

Colin Simonds, Thinkplay Ltd.

Timeline

We started our cooperation in 2013 by developing some website modifications and the first offline game Wordphun. Then we began the development of the morphun.education’s MVP in 2014 (finished in 2015), and the full version of the platform was released in 2017. We created the Simonds Family website in 2017. Finally, the Morphun ERP system was developed between 2016 and 2018.

Technology stack

Due to the differences between all the projects, various technologies were used when working with Morphun. We started from classic frontend technologies, such as JavaScript and jQuery, for the first offline games. When we were developing the Morphun.education platform, we first chose ASP.NET with MS SQL to quickly develop the first MVP version, but then we switched to Python/Django and PostgreSQL. Same technologies were chosen for the Morphun ERP system to keep the technology stack consistent across different projects. When working with the Simonds family, not even WordPress was beyond our reach, which was used for their Family website.

Our unique contribution

While it is not uncommon for software agencies such as Makimo to work on many projects with the same client, it is not that often when you have a unique opportunity to work with so many different members of the same family. We have found a way to work with members across multiple generations; the only issue is sometimes having too much work to be done and negotiating between them “who gets Makimo first.” It proves that we could fulfill the expectations of many stakeholders, which wouldn’t be possible without a subtle yet firm grasp of all the family members and team members on our part, including our Project Manager, Justyna. Last but not least, our contribution was not only to implement Simonds’ ideas but also to propose solutions proactively.