Designed for growing minds: A parent resource to support early learning

Project Details

As part of our work with ARCQE, we designed and built ARCQEtivity — a dedicated parent resource platform that child care facilities can offer directly to families as an added layer of support.

Built for parents and guardians, ARCQEtivity gives families access to guided, at-home activities that support early childhood development. The platform extends support beyond the classroom by providing practical, engaging resources families can use at home.

The Quick Take

ARCQEtivity is a family-facing website designed to make child development support more accessible, engaging, and easy to use.

We built a gated platform where parents can access activities tailored to their child’s age and developmental needs, alongside a separate educator experience that allows child care staff to favourite and reuse activities by room or group. 

Beyond functionality, ARCQEtivity stands out for its bright, playful design. Custom-illustrated animal characters, thoughtful progress tracking, and interactive features create an experience that feels warm, engaging, and approachable. The result is an award-winning website that supports both families and educators while making developmental learning fun and intuitive.

The Full Story

Problem Statement

ARCQE wanted to create a digital experience that child care facilities could offer to parents as an additional support tool. The goal was to provide families with practical, engaging resources that help support their child’s development at home.

What We Did

ARCQEtivity was a really fun challenge for our team. The site is set up as a gated resource, meaning families need to have their child enrolled in an ARCQE care facility, but direct access is free once enrolled. Parents can browse activities organized by their child’s age and developmental domain, making it easy to find resources that align with their child’s current stage of learning.

A key part of the build was designing for real family use. We created a system where a single parent account could manage multiple children at different ages and developmental stages, rather than requiring separate accounts. Custom child profiles and avatars added a personal, engaging layer to the experience.

Next we expanded the platform to support educators as well. Because child care staff interact with the activity library differently than parents, we designed a dedicated educator interface that allows staff to favourite, organize, and quickly revisit activities by room or group.

Some of the key features of the website include:

• A parent dashboard tree that grows new leaves as activities are completed.
• Illustrated activity cards in list view, with a sprout that grows from seed to plant across age ranges.
• Smarter, context-aware filters that surface only the options relevant to the selected category.
• A materials checklist parents can tick off within each activity.
• A printable tree and leaf progress tracker to help children track their progress in a playful, off-screen way.
• An activity library organized by age range and developmental domain.
• Custom child profiles and avatars within a single parent account.
• A separate educator interface for favouriting and organizing activities.

Outcomes

Launched in September 2024, ARCQEtivity gave child care facilities a new way to extend developmental support beyond the classroom.

Parents now have an intuitive, easy-to-use resource for discovering practical, development-focused activities they can do with their children at home. Educators benefit from a streamlined way to organize and reuse trusted resources within their programs.

The platform has also been recognized with a 2025 Platinum AVA Digital Award, highlighting its creativity, usability, and meaningful impact in supporting early childhood development.