Sleuth IT, Adventure Games for Literacy

1. Hi Joe, we know you're a long-time supporter of Book Creator - when did you first start using the app and why?

Indeed! I was one of the really adopters, when Book Creator was just images and text! No video or sound! I immediately saw its massive potential and started showing it at BETT in 2012, the year after it was released. Dan Amos came down to watch his creation being demonstrated live. I think he was shocked to see it being shown to large audiences so quickly.

2. Tell us what you're up to these days.

Aside from delivering training for Apple (which invariably has Book Creator involved somewhere) we have developed and launched Sleuth IT, Adventure Games for Literacy. Essentially combining gamification techniques within a ‘whodunnit’ scenario to engage and excite students with literacy work. As part of this, we use Book Creator as an ideal vehicle for the students journals/notebooks that student work is framed and supported with.

3. How does Sleuth IT work?

We have 11 games from ages 6-16, with 'Who Ate the Cake' through to the 'Mystery of Shakespeare’s Globe'. Each game is episodic, like a TV series, or chapter of a book. Each game has six iBeacons that allow the teacher to control the pace of access to each episode or indeed deploy the iBeacons around a space, for example around a school to create an interactive environment for the game.

4. Why should schools invest in Sleuth IT?

Essentially to engage and excite their students with reading! Each Sleuth IT game comes with 10 weeks of resources, learning activities, projects, files etc. so that the one-off purchase of the package gives them a wealth of resource they then own to use on an annual basis.

5. Who is already using Sleuth IT?

We currently have schools globally using all of our games, right across the age range of 6-16. UK, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Finland, Belgium, Portugal and Turkey are some of our biggest users.

6. How can a school get started with Sleuth IT?

We have a teacher ’taster’ available where teachers not only play some of the games and try out the resources, but where they play a game especially written for them - ’The Time Machine’ - to get a real hands on evaluation of how Sleuth IT works. This is easy to set up as we have Sleuth IT advocates  ("Watsons") in many countries.

7. Any other projects in the pipeline?

Yes! A new series of games is currently in development - 'The Sherlock Club’. Think Famous Five meets the Goonies meets Stranger Things where a group of four children and their rather large dog, Sherlock, have a series of adventures inside the books of the their local library. The first five of these will be released later in 2020.

You can learn more about Sleuth IT at sleuthit.com. Their app is available on App Store for iPads and also on Google Play for Android tablets. Follow Joe on Twitter.