For children, digital and physical play and/or learning don’t have to be mutually exclusive concepts. British startup Night Zookeeper is the latest company exploring the idea of blending the two areas.

It started life in 2007 as a project in schools where then-teacher Paul Hutson got children to draw magical animals for an imaginary “Night Zoo”. More than 500,000 children have since taken part through a mixture of in-person and online sessions.

As a company, Night Zookeeper diversified into apps: 2012’s Night Zookeeper Drawing Torch encouraged children to create their magical animals with digital tools in response to “drawing missions”, before 2013’s Night Zookeeper Teleporting Torch expanded the idea, complete with a dashboard for parents to get involved too.

In 2014, the company is trying something new: a website version that also runs on touchscreen devices, which besides getting children to draw, includes more gaming elements and encourages its users to write stories.

The new site soft-launched in October, and is free to use for children, with no advertising. Instead, it will make its money from a “fan club” feature where parents pay £5 a month or £27 for lifetime membership.

For that, they get unlimited access to the website, more stories, weekly suggestions for educational activities, and fan club packs for their children with stickers, t-shirts and a letter from the fictional Night Zookeeper welcoming them.

It’s aimed at 5-11 year-old children, with the hope that their parents will get involved too. “Everything your child does, they can email it to you in a very safe, secure and locked-down system,” managing director Joshua Davidson told the Guardian.

“Parents can play along passively or actively. They can look at the emails and reward them with orbs – the in-game currency – or they can be very active and help them create animals and write stories about them.”

Note, the orbs can only be earned: there are no in-app purchases in the world of the Night Zookeeper. But there is plenty of sharing: children are able to go to its “Midnight Market” to browse one another’s animals, and collect them for their own zoo.

“I am the proud owner of the first magical animal marketplace for kids!” said Davidson, who wrote the original story that became Night Zookeeper. “If you do a really good drawing and people collect your stuff, you get extra orbs. So this is a currency that’s all about effort.”

Back to that online/offline aspect. Children can draw their animals using the Night Zookeeper website, or draw them on paper then scan them in. Meanwhile, Davidson says that his company’s own research suggests that at least a fifth of children who experience Night Zookeeper at school “come home and start writing stories” – something that he hopes will also happen with the new website.

Stories are a big part of the site, too. “Children unlock the story as they illustrate. Each zone of the world has a storybook attached, which they unlock by doing drawings,” said Davidson.

“So you’re getting to illustrate a book, but there’s also another side where kids write stories about their animals. We want to provide a huge amount of inspiration for story writing and character creation.”

The gaming elements also tie in to this, as children have to defend their zoo against monsters who periodically attack it. The game part takes place on a hexagonal map, with children also sorted “in a Harry Potter way” into unions with their own leaderboards and communities.

In some ways, Night Zookeeper is following the path of a conventional tech startup: for example, it was part of Telefonica’s Wayra startup accelerator in 2012, then raised £150k of seed funding in 2013 and a further round of £440k in 2014.

Davidson said that the company is focused on far more than profits and potential exits in the future, though. “We’re an education company trying to make something that’s going to entertain kids, as opposed to an entertainment company trying to get into education,” he said.

“One thing we’ve done in forming the company is to make ourselves a social enterprise, for example. Our articles of association say we’ll always have a free offering for schools, and we’re trying hard to reach disadvantaged kids.”

That’s one reason for shifting focus from native iOS apps to an HTML5 website that can be accessed from more devices through their web browsers. “Our guys are using HTML5 to do increasingly interactive, engaging experiences,” he said.

“You can’t beat the accessibility of the web, and if you’re building something you want maximum exposure for, and you can build it on a platform that’s accessible to as many people as possible, why wouldn’t you?”

Davidson is also hoping that parents will appreciate the fact that Night Zookeeper’s real potential is about the real-world interactions with their children, rather than purely digital entertainment that separates the generations. Although it’s not just apps that get in the way of parents spending time with their children.

“If you’re at work until 7pm, your daughter might be sending yuo drawings, or writing a story about the flying hippo-bat that she’s created. And you can be taking part in that,” said Davidson, who also pitched Night Zookeeper as a healthy alternative to freemium mobile games like Candy Crush Saga, which some children’s apps firms have suggested are the real competition for their work.

“You don’t have to make these fruit machine-style massive addiction games. Kids love them, but they’re not bringing them the same inner emotional-soul rewards that playing with their parents in any capacity or form would do,” said Davidson.

“If you look at Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and other success stories out there, that’s our competition. We will fail if we can’t compete and make something better in that sense. But even what we do isn’t any substitute for a bit of one-on-one time with a parent when a child is getting their full attention.”

Shared creativity is the big pitch for Night Zookeeper, though. The company recently commissioned a survey of 1,000 British parents with 5-11 year-old children, and found that while three quarters of parents worry that modern computer games don’t allow creative freedom in children, roughly the same amount think that modern technology can provide a vehicle for creativity.

The company’s job now is to attract enough children, and persuade enough parents to pay for the fan club, to provide competition for those bigger, established brands in the children’s apps space.

“A lot of the digital success stories in the children’s space haven’t come from stories: they’ve come from pieces of interaction. Temple Run, Angry Birds, Moshi Monsters... They weren’t initially stories,” said Davidson, although he stressed his respect for those brands, and their creators’ efforts to add storytelling as time has gone on.

“I think the brands people fall in love with in the children’s space are the ones that have an emotional character-driven experience behind them. We hope there is an emotional journey in Night Zookeeper, as well as the fact that children are actually creating the characters. Now we just want more people to fall in love with that story.”

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