Chao Kindergarten

The Kindergarten is the classroom: enrol a chao in a subject, it practises, and ten minutes later it has learned a skill for life. Open it from the garden panel.

There is nothing to win. Skills are things a chao can then do, in the garden and at festival performances.

How a lesson works

One student at a time. Pick a chao and a subject, and it settles on the classroom floor with the right props in hand, practising for ten minutes of real time. Then it graduates and the skill is added to its record permanently.

You do not have to stay. The lesson is written down when it starts, with the time it will finish. Leave the classroom, return to the garden, or close the app, and the lesson still completes.

While a chao is at school it is not in the garden. It comes back when the lesson ends.

The sixteen subjects

Seven instruments, four dances, two expression classes, one art class, and two field classes.

The field pair are the exception. Fishing and Bug Catching are not performances; they change what a chao does on its own in the garden. Everything else is something to watch.

What skills are for

A learned skill is permanent, belongs to that chao, and needs no maintenance.

Skills appear in three places:

• In the garden, as things a chao chooses to do by itself.
• At festivals, where chao perform for an audience.
• On the chao’s record, alongside its trophies.

A chao carries its skills for its whole life but not through rebirth.

Where the Kindergarten fits

It asks least of you and least of your chao. There is no level requirement, no way to fail and nothing to lose, and a newly hatched child can enrol on its first day.

It is built around being away: ten minutes is long enough that watching the whole thing is a choice, so the natural rhythm is to enrol someone on your way out and find them graduated when you return.

If you want a chao that fishes the pond by itself, this is where that starts.