Colombia and Brazil both write gender equality into their education policy, but the idea of what a "boy" or "girl" should be reaches children long before they're old enough to question it, through the toys, colors, and characters marketed to them from birth. This design thesis set out to reach kids in early childhood, ages 0 to 5, with a free, playful way into the topic, without turning it into a lecture.

El Primer Día de Clase ("The First Day of Class") is a free, open-source interactive picture book for the browser. Its characters are geometric shapes rather than boys and girls, drawing on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican figures whose gender wasn't fixed to a single form, deliberately withholding the visual shorthand that usually tells a child a character's gender. Readers move through a school day, including the classroom, recess, and walking home, using arrow navigation and the cursor to trigger movement, sound, and small interactions, like writing on a chalkboard or "tickling" a shape to make it laugh. The book moved through a hand-cut storyboard, a printed prototype, and a vector prototype in Illustrator before being built and published on Glitch.

Produced as a Design Master's thesis at Universidad de los Andes (2018), the project was developed in consultation with published children's book illustrator Claudia Rueda, who reviewed prototypes and shaped its pacing and narrative logic. It translates research on gender theory, concrete poetry, and Mesoamerican art into a picture book anyone can open for free, or fork and adapt on Glitch. No usage metrics were tracked for this academic project, but every design decision, from early sketches through the final interactive build, is documented in full.