UKLA is delighted to announce The Famous Five Adventure Game by Kuato Studios as winner of the Open University/UKLA Digital Book Award 2019. This is a national award that recognises digital books which support children’s reading for pleasure and enjoyment of stories.
The Famous Five Adventure Game ingeniously combines small games with stories to support children’s language and literacy skills. As children progress through the story, they solve small quizzes about sentence structure or vocabulary and learn about story characters and the values they represent. What is particularly innovative with the app is that each child gets their own customized digital storybook. The app remembers the answers children provided during the quizzes and based on their progress and preferences, generates a storybook. The teacher judges praised the app’s features and possibilities for enriching the literacy curriculum. The app has no advertising and no in-app purchases and contains a Grown Ups Corner, where teachers can select OpenDyslexic font or the length of time children can play the game. The children who participated in the judging process have very much enjoyed using the app in their classrooms. Some expressed their enthusiasm in posters, which will be shared at the UKLA’s International Conference in July 2019 in Sheffield.
The Award Committee thanks all participating teachers and children. New digital book submissions for 2020 Award will be open in September 2019.
Natalia Kucirkova, Award Chair
