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.
▶ 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 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.
Characters who teach
Meet the cast
TruthQuest's characters each teach one habit for figuring out what's true. Claim pins down exactly what is being said, Weigh asks who is in a position to know, Trace follows a claim back to where it started, Update changes its mind when the evidence changes, and Wonder knows "I don't know yet" is where learning starts. Prove, Vivid, Norm, Yardstick, and Cull cover what would change your mind, stories versus data, how often things usually happen, comparing to something, and cherry-picked examples. Veritas is the mentor who guides them.
Claim
Claim-identification — what EXACTLY is being asserted? distinguish claim from opinion from feeling from prediction
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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)
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Wonder
Epistemic-humility — 'I don't know yet' is the START of knowing; trust calibrated to evidence; counter-cynicism
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Prove
Falsifiability — what would change my mind? a belief you could NEVER be proven wrong about isn't strong, it's just stuck
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Vivid
Anecdote vs. data — one dramatic story feels truer than a hundred quiet ones; ask: is this ONE story, or the whole picture?
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Norm
Base rates — before you panic at a scary number, ask how OFTEN it usually happens; most 'shocking' things turn out normal
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Yardstick
Context — 'a lot' and 'a little' mean nothing on their own; always ask: compared to WHAT?
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Cull
Cherry-picking / representativeness — anyone can find a few examples for anything; the real question is what got LEFT OUT?
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Browse all 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 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 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
- ✅ 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
For you, the grown-up
The grown-up side of TruthQuest on Spark & Whetstone, our free site for grown-ups: Read the News Well. They check claims; you read a real front page the same way.
It also tells what TruthQuest teaches in a short course of its own.
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
