STEM
MarketQuest
Virtual economy where students explore supply and demand, set prices, trade goods, and run market experiments -- building economic literacy through hands-on simulation and strategic decision-making.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, praises, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Stake
#29B6F6 MarketQuest is a virtual economy where you learn economics by doing it. Set prices, trade goods, run market experiments, and discover why supply and demand drive the world. You will learn what happens when prices change, how businesses compete, why shortages and surpluses occur, and how economic events ripple through a market. Your AI mentor guides you through economic reasoning and celebrates strategic thinking.
Distributed-narrative cast
Meet the cast
MarketQuest's 10-character cast embodies the foundational market mechanics — supply (Stock), demand (Crave), price equilibrium (Even), market roles (Hand), market events (Tide), opportunity cost (Forgo), saving + interest (Seed), specialization + trade (Knack), money as exchange (Coin), and incentives (Spur). Stake (mentor) frames each primitive; cast embodies them at small-trader / community-market scale (NEVER Wall-Street register). Wealth-shame gate enforced: cast NEVER frames poverty as moral failing.
Stock
Supply — producer decisions, scarcity, what gets brought to market
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Crave
Demand — consumer preferences, needs vs wants, price-sensitivity
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Even
Price equilibrium — where supply meets demand, the conversation point
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Hand
Market roles — producer + consumer + distributor, visible labor
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Tide
Market events — shocks + policy + trade flows read as patterns
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Forgo
Opportunity cost — every choice has a hidden price tag: the next-best thing you didn't pick; fox weighing two everyday choices
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Seed
Saving + interest — set a little aside on purpose; patience grows a small store into a larger one; tortoise with a clay saving-jar
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Knack
Specialization + trade — do the thing you do best, trade for the rest, and both sides end up with more; beaver brokering bread-for-baskets
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Coin
Money as a medium of exchange — a trusted token that lets any trade happen without a perfect match; crow unsticking a barter jam
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Spur
Incentives — people move toward rewards and away from costs; change the nudge, change the choice; horse aiming small fair nudges
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Browse all 10 chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Price Setting
Choose a good and set your price using the slider. Watch how customers respond -- set the price too high and nobody buys; set it too low and you lose money on e
Trading
Buy goods at wholesale prices and sell them at retail. Manage your inventory, watch your cash balance, and calculate profit per unit. Learn the difference betwe
Market Events
Random and scripted events shake up the market. A storm destroys crops and food prices spike. A new technology makes production cheaper. A government policy cha
Supply & Demand Explorer
Experiment with supply and demand curves directly. Drag the curves to see how equilibrium price and quantity change. Discover why prices rise when demand increa
Mentored by Stake — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How MarketQuest handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ No ads, no in-app purchases — you pay once
- ✅ COPPA compliant under the 2026 FTC amendments
- ✅ Parental controls + session limits + content filters built in
MarketQuest runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
MarketQuest is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch