Our Story

Playto creates learning tools that harness the power of game play to support happy, healthy and productive minds in learning the life skills and positive habits they’ll need for the rest of their lives.

There are skills in life that are hard to teach, but we know our children need.  Skills like concentration, organization, and mindfulness.

Our mission at Playto is to enable children to improve these fundamental life skills while having fun and to allow parents to monitor this improvement.

Our first game, GlowMaster, teaches children 7-13 years old how to master their own focus and attention through a complete training program that kids will want to play.

We know what so many parents are going through with their children when it comes to focusing. We’ve been there. We’ve experienced the cultural inhibitors, judgement and frustration. We’ve had those moments of desperation and confusion. We’ve had that feeling of utter hopelessness.

But we also know the truth: we all just want to give our kids the very best.

We want our kids to have the chance to experience something that’s both beneficial and fun. We wanted an alternative to more invasive and expensive therapies and treatments. We wanted our children to learn foundational skills in their own environment and in their own way. So we decided to harness the power of play.

Using the principles of neurofeedback therapy combined with advanced gameplay design, we brought together hardware and software designers, cognitive behavioural therapists and of course, fellow parents, to become Playto.

We’re on this experiential journey together – illuminating the way, through the power of play.

Meet Vernée

As a working mother of three daughters in today’s Age of Distraction, I am constantly looking for learning tools that are easy-to-use, effective, and affordable. Attention is so critical towards helping my daughters achieve their dreams, so I wanted a product that would help them understand how to master their attentional skills. But I struggled to find anything that was as engaging. So, I found some of the world’s top game designers – creators of Star Wars, Barbie, Guitar Hero and Sesame Street video games – to build a game that kids would play while effectively mastering their focus skills.

-Vernée Ho, CEO and co-founder

Meet Ann

From my clinical practice, I knew that if the kids could understand what it felt like to concentrate, if they could just practice concentrating, they could master the skill. I read the research papers on neurofeedback therapy, where students were shown a visual indication of their level of focus and were encouraged by the psychologist to increase the level and duration of concentration. There were many successful approaches that we used as the basis for building an effective game for teaching children how become mindful of how to master their own focus.

– Ann Bridgewater, co-founder & clinical psychologist