A Miami mother named Ronit Shiro has turned a challenge from her own home into a learning tool for other families, creating a game called Feppy after recognizing a need within her own multicultural and multilingual household. What began as a personal observation about how her children were learning has since grown into a product aimed at families who want their kids to grow up comfortable in more than one language.
The name itself carries the idea behind the project. Feppy is meant to embody bilingual happiness, blending the Spanish word feliz with the English word happy. That fusion of two languages into a single word mirrors exactly what Shiro set out to do with the game, which treats Spanish and English not as separate subjects but as two halves of the same experience.
Shiro launched Feppy in 2020, right before the pandemic took hold, at a moment when families suddenly needed new ways to keep their children learning at home. The timing meant that a tool built around at-home, play-based learning arrived just as parents were searching for exactly that kind of resource, with classrooms closed and routines upended across South Florida and beyond.
As a bilingual mother, she said she saw a clear gap in what was already available. Most educational tools, in her experience, focused on either English or Spanish rather than both together. She wanted to find a product that could really bring the family together, and out of that search for something genuinely bilingual, Feppy was born.
Central to the project is a collection of Feppy books, each of them bilingual by design. Every book presents Spanish on one side and English on the other, allowing a child and a parent to move between the two languages within the same story rather than choosing one over the other before they even begin to read together.
The books also reach beyond the printed page. At the beginning of each one there is a QR code, and when it is scanned it unlocks an audio version of the story. That lets a family keep the physical copy in hand while choosing whether to listen in Spanish or in English, adding a layer of sound and pronunciation to the reading experience one word at a time.
Taken together, the approach is built to grow bilingual skills through hands-on, multisensory play and games that slip naturally into a child's everyday routines. The aim, as Shiro describes it, is to make language learning feel less like studying and more like play, so that picking up a second language becomes part of the fun rather than another task on the schedule.