Academics
HaikuQuest
Write haiku, tanka, cinquain and limericks with a live syllable meter, and learn where each form comes from and the poets who made it.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, 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 Cherry
#F4A5B8 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Cherry the cherry blossom guides HaikuQuest, travelling with grove friends who each hold one part of the craft: counting sounds, a well-placed pause, a season word that anchors the poem, and saying less. Haiku comes from Japanese tradition, and the app credits its poets and terms to that tradition.
Count
Syllable count / count-discipline — magpie whose beak-tap enacts the rhythmic underpinning of every counted form
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Pause
Kireji / cut / productive break — snowy-egret whose perpetually-mid-step body IS the kireji in physical form
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Lantern
Season-word / anchoring image — chipmunk whose wooden lantern visibly shifts color with the season
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Trim
Brevity / saying-less — red-squirrel with brass scissors who snips redundant words to find the smaller-stronger version
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Flint
Juxtaposition — flinty badger-creature who strikes two smooth stones to make a spark; two images set side by side make a third meaning leap up in the gap
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Gallop
Meter / the stressed beat — long-legged pony-creature whose hooves fall da-da-DUM; not how MANY beats (that's Count) but which ones to stomp (esp. the limerick)
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Bell
Rhyme — silver creature with tuned tail-bells that chime the same note when end-sounds match; a forced rhyme jammed in just to chime is worse than none
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Hinge
The line break — folding-door creature who holds a small pause at the end of each line; the end of a line is a little stage, so end on a word that earns it
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Mold
Shape on the page — clay-colored creature who builds a poem's silhouette (a cinquain's 2-4-6-8-2 diamond); shape is meaning you can see from across the room
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Braid
Sound texture — nimble creature who weaves repeated sounds through a line (alliteration + assonance); enough echo makes music, too much makes a tongue-twister knot
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Write haiku, tanka, cinquain and limericks with a live syllable meter, and learn where each form comes from and the poets who made it.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Cherry — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How HaikuQuest handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
HaikuQuest 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
HaikuQuest 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
