AeronauticsALTEN and Burns and Smiles launch the game “The Kingdom of Ailm”: when solidarity helps burned children better navigate their care pathway
What does the support of a burned child in hospital look like when, in addition to medical care, you offer them a universe where they can understand, play, grow and rebuild themselves?
This is the ambition behind The Kingdom of Ailm, an application imagined and developed by ALTEN, the world leader in engineering and technology consulting, through its solidarity program, which enables employees to support associations with technological projects. In partnership with Burns and Smiles, an association dedicated to resilience and support for burn patients, the program was designed with healthcare professionals, psychologists, engineers and artists. This narrative video game uses gamification as both an emotional and educational lever to restore meaning and understanding for hospitalized children.
Gamification serving care: understand, process, progress
Designed for children aged 6 to 12, the application offers an adventure universe in which the young patient becomes a small, burned dragon — a symbolic avatar of their own reconstruction. Mission after mission, the child discovers notions related to healing, medical procedures, and the role of caregivers, transposed into a fantasy world.
The “Parasychampotes” represent, for instance, the bacteria that hinder healing, while “druids & mages” embody caregivers, the medical team, or scientific research.
For Laurent Gaudens, founder of Burns and Smiles and himself a former burn patient, the stakes are high: “When you are a burned child, the hospital can feel like an incomprehensible world. The Kingdom of Ailm translates care into a story the child can make their own. It is a companion, a guide, an emotional support. Thanks to the commitment of our volunteers and partners, we can finally offer families a tool designed entirely for them.”
A dedicated section of the app is made for parents, offering accessible medical explanations enhanced with educational resources from Burns and Smiles. This dual experience — the child playing and the parent understanding — is one of the application’s core strengths.
A collective adventure bringing together engineers, artists, and volunteers
Beyond the solidarity program, this project brought together an outstanding community of more than sixty contributors. Nineteen ALTEN employees joined through the solidarity program, alongside forty-four volunteers — engineers, artists, students, creators — who donated their time and talent to bring the application to life.
This exceptional mobilization includes diverse profiles: engineers, testers, game designers, and project managers from ALTEN teams located in Belgium, France, Morocco, Spain and Italy; three students from ISART Digital joined through the solidarity program; musicians and composers, including members of the association CEBIJE (Centre Boulonnais d’Initiatives Jeunesse); scriptwriters; L’École de la Voix – Vox Populi and studio Locali in Lyon, supported by a sound engineer, a sound designer, four student interns and fourteen professional voice actors — among them Laurent Pasquier (official voice of Mickey Mouse) and Damien Laquet (official voice of the Rabbids for the television series).
ALTEN also involved engineering schools through a national Solidarity Challenge, won by the Junior-Enterprise N7 Consulting, which designed two mini-games integrated into the app — a way to connect student innovation with a public-health initiative and reinforce the link between learning, creativity and social impact.
“With The Kingdom of Ailm, we demonstrate that a video game can become a true mediator in a care pathway. This project was born from collective momentum: ALTEN engineers and volunteers combined their talents and energy to bring it to life. By placing our technological expertise at the service of a deeply human cause, we wanted to create a solidarity-driven tool capable of helping every child better understand what they are going through and find hope again,” explains Sandrine Melis, Head of Skills-based Sponsorship and Solidarity Projects at ALTEN.
The project is part of an ongoing collaboration between ALTEN, its employees, volunteers and the association, which is already active in ten hospitals in France to support children and families during the most sensitive moments of their journey.
Official launch on December 11, 2025
The application was unveiled during an event held at ALTEN’s headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the presence of Burns and Smiles, partner schools, and the teams who contributed to the project.
The beta version of The Kingdom of Ailm will then be made available to families for initial user feedback.