STEM
PuzzleForge
Every puzzle hides one rule — find it, and the moves fall into place. Mechanical-puzzle workshop (Hanoi, sliding tiles, river-crossings) on a computational-thinking spine, for ages 9–14.
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 Sprocket
#7C6BD9 Distributed-narrative cast
Meet the cast
PuzzleForge is a workshop of classic mechanical puzzles — Tower of Hanoi, sliding tiles, river-crossings, and more — where each puzzle hides ONE solving rule. The cast are puzzle-solvers whose defining act IS the mechanism: recursion, state-space search, parity, constraint, optimality. Keeper Sprocket frames 'make your solving strategy visible' and normalizes being stuck.
Nestor
Recursion / decomposition — solves the big tower by first solving the smaller tower off to the side (Hanoi self-reference)
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Minim
Optimality — refuses any solution longer than the fewest possible moves
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Wend
State-space search — maps which positions are reachable before committing to a move
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Evan
Parity / solvability — counts the tile-swaps mod 2 and knows at a glance if a scramble can ever be solved
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Faro
Look-ahead / planning — looks several moves ahead to clear a path before touching a piece
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Skiff
Constraint satisfaction — ferries across the river without ever leaving the wolf with the goat
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Gill
GCD / number reasoning — measures an exact amount by pouring back and forth between two jugs
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Gray
Binary / Gray-code — frees the rings by changing exactly one at a time in a fixed order
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Vault
Reduction / monovariant — jumps one peg over another and removes it, shrinking the board toward a single survivor
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Sprocket
The workshop keeper (mentor) — frames 'make your solving strategy visible' and normalizes being stuck
Read chapter →
Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Every puzzle hides one rule — find it, and the moves fall into place. Mechanical-puzzle workshop (Hanoi, sliding tiles, river-crossings) on a computational-thinking spine, for ages 9–14.
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 Sprocket — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How PuzzleForge 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
PuzzleForge 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
PuzzleForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
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