Keywords
daily educational games, critical thinking

Technologies
ios, mobile game

This project designs and evaluates Spurdle, a bite sized daily educational narrative game that supports critical thinking to help users recognise and resist conspiratorial content. To inform this design, this study explores the lived experiences of individuals who already engage with short-form educational games such as Wordle and Duolingo. It asks: How do daily educational games shift from a task to a valued routine, and what emotional or reflective changes accompany this process? A qualitative study with ten regular players combined seven days of in situ diary entries with follow up interviews, analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Findings highlight the role of structural features such as streaks and daily resets, and the framing of play as a cognitively productive alternative to passive digital consumption. Emotional engagement was meaningful yet contained, and repeated completion offered micro achievement and personal benchmarking. These insights shaped Spurdle’s continuity cues, micro feedback, and daily closure mechanics, demonstrating the potential of once a day formats as low barrier tools for supporting digital literacy.