For grown-ups
BackstageQuest is a career-exploration game for the middle years — the museum jobs a visitor never sees. Each job is built from a real tool, a real rule, and a real failure mode: pick full power on the air scribe and the fossil chips; ship the loan uninsured and one accident is a total loss; let the butterfly house dry out and the chrysalises fail.
How to play
- Pick a job from the rotation: Preparator, Registrar, Live-keeper, Fabricator, or Educator.
- Make the job's real decisions — a choice, or set a dial (humidity, light level).
- Press Do the job. If something's off, the game tells you exactly what would go wrong — then you fix it. It's a rehearsal; nothing is really harmed.
- Finish all five to complete your week backstage.
What it's good for
It's career exploration for 9–14 (most career apps start at high school), plus engineering thinking (working within real constraints, NGSS) and responsible decision-making (CASEL). It's not a brain-training program and makes no claim it raises IQ or test scores — it's a look at real work, with the real trade-offs.