Richard Bolland

Teneo, SA's No.1 online school, came to us with a problem a lot of online schools have: how do you make logging into a portal feel less like admin and more like something a kid actually wants to do?

So over a year we created a mascot, a rewards system, a leaderboard platform, and a whole avatar system to keep children excited to log on each day. It's working: learners who engage with the leaderboard are passing at up to 7x the rate of those who don't.

Give the above student profile & avatar creator a try! It's fully interactive - all made in Rive!

1. The Brief

Teneo wanted a character who could live inside their learner portal and act as a genuine ally to their students, mostly 10 to 16 year olds. That's a tricky age to design for. Too childish and you lose the young teens. Too try-hard and "on-trend" and you end up with something that reads as exactly what it is: an adult's idea of what's cool. The mascot needed to sit right in the middle, smart, upbeat, encouraging, but never condescending.

It also had to actually do things, not just look nice. Wave when a student logs in. React when they climb the leaderboard. Nudge them toward a new feature. And underneath all of that, it needed to plug into Teneo's real infrastructure, an authenticated single sign-on, live data feeds, and a backend that couldn't be an afterthought just because the front end had a friendly face on it.

2. Finding the Character

This is usually the hardest part of any mascot project, and this one was no exception. We worked through a long list of directions before landing on the right one, lemurs, chameleons, rabbits, squirrels and elephants, testing each against Teneo's brand personality of "extraordinary unlocked" and moving on when it didn't quite fit.

Once we had a general creature type in mind, it was a matter of refining pose, personality and proportions until the character actually felt right.

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Ottie the Otter was the one that stuck. Approachable, a bit cheeky, expressive without overacting, the kind of character a student is happy to see turn up, rather than one they tolerate.

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3. How the Project Has Grown

What started as a single mascot brief has turned into four ongoing workstreams:

Ottie: Interactive Mascot (built in Rive)
This is the core of the project. We started with a formal proposal and SOW in August 2025, moved through moodboarding to lock in Ottie's design, then built a live Rive prototype of the leaderboard to test the interactions before committing. Phase 1 shipped that September/October, the finished mascot and leaderboard, fully integrated with an authenticated single sign-on.

Mascot Intelligence
A mascot that reacts is good. A mascot that reasons is better. Starting with an engagement brief in December 2025, we built out the logic behind Ottie's rankings, banking, and deployment. There's now a 2026 roadmap agreed with Teneo for a Rewards Mall, a Social Layer, and a badges system, moving Ottie from a scripted character into something closer to a mascot guide.

The Points/Rewards Leaderboard Platform
This is the technical engine behind everything Ottie does, and it's the workstream that's stayed the most continuously active. It covers ongoing deployment, roadmap planning, bug fixes, a "Dev Mode" diagnostics tool for troubleshooting, Academic Leaderboards, Student Banking, and integration with Isazi's data feeds.

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Student Avatars & Profiles
Alongside Ottie, we built a way for students to personalise their own identity in the portal. We started with a style exploration across four different directions, from a simple set of 8 preset avatars, through to a customizer mixing head shape, body and accessories, an animation set based on the learner's mood, and a full body customizer with head, body, legs and accessories giving over 600 possible combinations. Phase 2 built on this with student status updates and peer commendation badges, letting students recognise each other for things like being a good friend or a maths whiz. Phase 3 is set to bring in CometChat, adding safe, moderated messaging between students without them needing to leave the portal.

4. The Results

A year in, the numbers back up what Ottie set out to do:

6. Why It's Worked

None of this happened as one big handover. It's grown feature by feature, brief by brief, because the mascot was never really the end goal, it was the entry point into a bigger system that keeps students engaged with their own progress. Ottie just happens to be the one doing the waving.

7. Teneo Testimonial

At Teneo, we set out to reimagine how our learners experience progress. Smart Rewards began as our vision - a behavioural layer built on a simple conviction: that children learn best when they are drawn toward mastery rather than driven by the fear of falling short. We had a clear picture of what we wanted: an intelligent digital mascot that speaks to each learner about their individual strengths and areas to grow, leaderboards, a points-banking mechanic, an avatar creator and learner badges, all working together to prime, incentivise and guide children toward becoming masters of their own academic success. But a vision on paper is only ever the starting point. To turn that thinking into something children could genuinely step into and enjoy, we needed a creative team with the craft to translate intent into experience - and that is where StudioBo came in.

What StudioBo did - and did exceptionally well - was bring that vision to life with real artistry. They have a rare gift for listening closely to a brief and then executing it with precision, holding faithfully to the intent behind every detail while elevating it beyond what we had imagined on paper. Words on a document became a fully interactive, dynamic and engaging playground for our learners - polished, thoughtful and alive with the character we had hoped for. Throughout the build they were exceptional collaborators: generous with ideas, meticulous in their craft, and unfailingly responsive to the standard we were reaching for. The refinements they brought always served our concept rather than reshaping it, and it is that blend of creativity and discipline that made them such a pleasure to work with.

The result speaks for itself. Smart Rewards has changed the way our learners relate to their own progress - they now want to excel, engaging with their learning as something to be enjoyed and owned rather than something they are forced into and reprimanded for failing. We have seen this reflected in stronger engagement and encouraging gains in educational performance across the programme. We're proud of the idea, and grateful that in StudioBo we found a partner able to execute it with the craft and care it deserved.

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Working on something that needs a bit of personality? Get in touch - we'd love to help.