About Build a Building

Build a Building is a gentle, no-ads building-site game for children aged 4 to 7 — dreamed up, from the diggers to the ribbon, by a five-year-old. The tools and materials sit in a tray along the bottom of the screen, and your child puts up a brand-new building by choosing what the builders need next. There are thirty-three of them: a little house, a dog kennel, an igloo, a tree house, a thatched cottage, a windmill, a church, a bridge, a train station, a hospital, a castle, a stadium, a pyramid, a lighthouse, a cathedral, an observatory and more. Simple ones come first; the grand ones are earned.

The sixty-odd tools and materials are the real ones, drawn by hand and named: spade and pick, trowel and chisel, spirit level and tape measure, cement mixer, dumper, crane and scaffold; sand, gravel, cement, mortar, bricks, blocks, stone, slate, thatch, timber, joists, rafters, girders, glass, screws, hinges, plaster, insulation and guttering. And the jobs run in the order a real site runs them — groundworks, then the structure, then the roof, then the windows and doors, then the pipes and wires hidden inside the walls, then the plaster and the paint. The chimney stack is finished before the roof goes on. The guttering goes up while the scaffolding is still there. Thatch is laid straight onto the battens with nothing underneath it.

The trick is that building is tricky in two ways: you need the right tool and the right material. The hammer is no good without the nails; the plumber’s spanner needs pipes to connect; the electrician’s pliers need wires before the lights come on. Matching tool to material — and doing the jobs in a sensible order, because you can’t put the roof on before the walls are up — is early sequencing and matching thinking, wrapped up in diggers and cement mixers.

How it works

• The jobs show along the top as a row of picture steps — the glowing one is what the builders need next.
• Find it in the tray and pop it onto the building site. The digger digs the hole, the mixer pours the cement, the bricklayer puts the walls up, and the building grows in front of you.
• Every job needs its pair: hammer and nails, spanner and pipes, pliers and wires — connect the wires and the windows really light up.
• Wrong one, or the right one too early? A friendly wobble and it hops back — no losing, no telling off. Try again.
• When the building is finished there’s a grand opening: the Big Boss arrives for a handshake (sometimes even the Queen!), and your child taps the red ribbon to cut it, open the building and win a star.
• Simple buildings come first; grander ones — castles with cranes, lighthouses with a real turning light, windmills whose sails actually turn, cathedrals wrapped in scaffolding — are earned as your child collects more stars.

How to play with your child

• Name the trades aloud. “Who fixes the pipes? The plumber! What does she need?” The vocabulary is the lesson.
• Ask what pairs with what. “We’ve got the hammer — what do we bang with it?”
• Spot buildings for real. On the school run, look for scaffolding, cranes and cones — the game is the rainy-day half of a habit.

More from Tadpole Games

• Make a Cake — bake a real cake in the right order, then decorate it.
• Tick or Fix — a daily phonics word puzzle for children aged 4 to 7.