Academics
TruthQuest
Players are junior journalists at the Truth Tribune, investigating viral claims, social media posts, and news articles. Using real journalistic techniques (source verification, reverse image search, statistical analysis), players determine what is true, misleading, or completely fabricated -- building critical thinking skills for the AI misinformation age.
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 Veritas
#4A6FA5 TruthQuest is a media literacy and fact-checking game for ages 9-14 where players investigate viral claims, social media posts, and news articles using real journalistic techniques — source verification, reverse image search simulation, and statistical analysis — to determine what is true, misleading, or fabricated.
Distributed-narrative cast
Meet the cast
TruthQuest's 5-character cast embodies the foundational epistemic practices per Stanford SHEG Civic Online Reasoning + News Literacy Project + Lewandowsky 2024 prebunking framework — claim-identification (Claim), credibility-evaluation (Weigh), evidence-traceback (Trace), belief-revision (Update), and epistemic-humility (Wonder). Veritas (mentor preserved; Latin 'truth'; non-religious classical-philosophy register) frames each primitive; cast embodies them at school-research / family-dinner-claim-checking / community-rumor scale (NEVER professional-fact-checker / PhD-philosopher framing). Conspiracy-content trauma gate enforced: cast NEVER engages specific real conspiracy theories — ALL examples FICTIONAL or ABSTRACT structural-analogs (per Lewandowsky 2024 prebunking-via-structural-analog recommendation). Trust-erosion gate enforced: cast NEVER drifts into 'trust nothing' cynicism; Wonder carries 'trust CALIBRATED to evidence + source' framing. Religious-belief sensitivity gate: cast distinguishes EMPIRICAL from BELIEF claims (kit 12); fictional-religion examples ONLY. External sensitivity reviewer with epistemology-pedagogy + adolescent-conspiracy-resistance + comparative-religion expertise REQUIRED before art generation.
Claim
Claim-identification — what EXACTLY is being asserted? distinguish claim from opinion from feeling from prediction
Read chapter →
Weigh
Credibility-evaluation — who's in a position to KNOW? what stake? calibration not verdict (shared design language with DebateForge Weigh)
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Trace
Evidence-traceback — where does this claim ORIGINATE? what's the chain? open four tabs; follow it back
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Update
Belief-revision — being WRONG is how knowledge MOVES; visibly carry old-guess and new-guess as data (shared design language with DebateForge Yield)
Read chapter →
Wonder
Epistemic-humility — 'I don't know yet' is the START of knowing; trust calibrated to evidence; counter-cynicism
Read chapter →
Browse all 5 chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Players are junior journalists at the Truth Tribune, investigating viral claims, social media posts, and news articles. Using real journalistic techniques (source verification, reverse image search, statistical analysis), players determine what is true, misleading, or completely fabricated -- building critical thinking skills for the AI misinformation age.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned kits × 25 questions = 400 questions per app, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Veritas — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How TruthQuest 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
TruthQuest 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
TruthQuest 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