Our Story
We are Zak and Ameena Golding – the Prime Ninjas. Among many other fun tasks that fill up our lives, we create games for mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads. We do it for fun and education…
We are from a family of five and we have followed an “alt education” model. Our company, Prime Ninjas, started as part of a home-ed project to explore digital entrepreneurship. In fact, that is one of the main reasons that we home-educate is so we can do things like this – i.e. “business” and academics at the same time. The company is run by Zak and Ameena Golding (12 and 14 years old), with the help of their younger brother Yousuf (9 years old). Zak and Ameena both attended Stanford’s Online High School for gifted youth (OHS): The Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY).
In our quest for knowledge and making the world a better place, we have developed a passion for stories. The ability to succeed in today’s competitive world is linked to the ability to be creative, which is closely linked to the ability to create and tell a story. When you tell stories, you are exercising the part of your brain that boosts your ‘creative intelligence’.
This is why we created Story Shout, a game developed for the iPhone and iPad to help increase creative thinking and develop your story-telling abilities. It’s also great for stimulating ideas for writers and clearing writer’s block! By presenting a series of visual prompts (glyphs) in the game, we force the player to think of a story that links all nine of the prompts. Not only that, the player has to shout the story out loud as he or she invents it!
That’s tough, but also fun…
It’s also invaluable.
But it’s also a game! We wanted a game to play as a family that also had “educational” value. We wanted a portable version too so that we could play it anywhere. Story Shout is the answer. We hope that you enjoy it.
We do charge for the game ($0.99), but not really in a quest to become rich. The whole creation of the app, the economics, distribution, usage and pricing are all part of a home-ed project. Who knows? It might become free if that’s what we conclude from the ongoing experiment. We do have other apps planned for your edufuntastic delight.
The glyphs (icons) for Story Shout were inspired by the fantastic Noun Project and we love them for what they’re doing. All use of images from their site are subject to license attributions, which you can read here. We currently use 223 (prime number) of the nouns, which we plan to increase in the future. Using the math for combinatorial sequences, this gives us approximately 1158 Billion Billion combinations. You won’t be able to tell that many stories if you tried!
Just remember Aristotle’s simple rule – Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.