How Naperville mom's board game teaches kids about careers

Not to knock Superman, Elsa or Anna, but one Naperville mom thinks kids have had enough.

“We have too many superheroes and princesses,” Niketa Jhaveri says.

What kids need, she says, is real-life examples of professionals to admire.

Enter Brave Champs, a board game Jhaveri launched this year to help teach kids about real-life careers through old-school fun.

“We want to inspire them to say, 'Let's not only talk about superheroes and let's not only talk about the fictional world,'” Jhaveri said.

Jhaveri's oldest son, 6-year-old Aarav, gave her the idea for the game by asking about all the workers their family would encounter, like “Who's the person dropping the mail?” Or “Who's the person driving the cool cars?”

The game, designed for kids ages 4 to 10, includes cards with 100 careers, each containing a brief description of the character and ending with the same question Aarav would ask: “Who am I?”

Players land on colorful squares that designate whether they'll be asked a question from the green pile, featuring the easiest careers to name, the yellow stack for middle difficulty or the red deck for tricky ones.

Answering the career that matches what's on the card means the player can keep the card, a valuable feat in a race to have the most cards by the time the first person reaches the end of the board.

Featured careers are called champions, and Jhaveri says she focused on fields that help communities function or inspire kids' imaginations. Included in the game are a firefighter, a teacher, a mayor, the president, a soldier, an astronaut, a dancer, a gymnast, a swimmer and dozens more.

“I wanted to increase the level of respect and importance we give to these community helpers,” Jhaveri said. “I wanted to bring that out with this game, not only for kids to understand, but to get inspired by these characters.”

Jhaveri took inspiration from her son's questions, then used expertise in IT and user experience design to develop the board game in six months. She consulted with an educator and ran focus groups with nearby children and parents, who helped choose the champions and perfect the game — down to details as small as whether the cards should be pointy and rectangular or have rounded edges.

Soon, kids in Aarav's kindergarten class at Fry Elementary School in Naperville were clamoring to play Brave Champs during “choice time,” teacher Linda Alley says.

“It was very, very engaging for them,” Alley said about the game that quickly became a hit among her students. “It really made them aware of what's going on in the world and what the different professions are.”

The game also helped the 5- and 6-year-olds with reading and comprehension, as they had to decipher multi-syllable words such as pediatrician, paramedic, choreographer or paleontologist.

“I really liked that they were able to socialize and use those skills and help each other to try to understand what was going on with the wording,” Alley said. “It always worked out. They never had to come ask me.”

Nanette Cote, a Naperville speech-language pathologist, has used Brave Champs in a therapeutic setting, working with kids who are largely nonverbal to practice responding in conversations.

When she would ask a question from a card such as “I take care of your teeth. Who am I?” her students used their communication devices to tell her the answer is a dentist.

“I was able to adapt this particular game to help them work on answering questions,” Cote said.

While many of her students with special needs might not grasp the career implications of Brave Champs, one normally developing boy she recently helped with a speech impediment understood and especially enjoyed a role-playing aspect of the game.

Ten squares on the Brave Champs board are bonus spots, which invite players to tell a story or put on a skit about the champion listed on the card.

“He really enjoyed that part where you could act out some of the characters,” Cote said.

The bonus cards are a way to keep kids active and attentive during the game, which takes roughly 20 minutes to play.

Jhaveri says she knows she's competing against video games and activities kids enjoy on tablets and computers. But she wanted to develop Brave Champs first as a board game to encourage social, in-person interaction.

“At first I wanted to prove the idea of the game — that it works and kids would learn something from it — and then go to the computer model,” Jhaveri said. “My idea is, let's play together and have a family time together for 20 minutes without the intrusion of the technology.”

The game is available for $24.99 on Amazon.com, at Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downers Grove and at Learning Express Toys in Naperville.

So far, Jhaveri says the game is achieving its aim of intriguing kids about actual career aspirations beyond superheroes and princesses. Aarav especially has taken a liking to the pilot character in the game, so much that he checked out all kinds of library books on flying and dressed as a pilot last year for Halloween.

“His curiosity increased after playing the game,” Jhaveri said. “There's always something for him to learn.”