Mr Glue Stories

Mr Glue is a quirky character who guides you through this lovely app. From the start of the main menu until the end of each story, he is there to offer help and prompts with a consistent and easy to follow approach.

The basic premise of Mr Glue Stories is that of an interactive story book. Users customise and personalise the stories as they go along to produce a tale that is truly their own. Each story starts by asking you for your name and gender, which are then incorporated as the hero of the story. As you go through the pages, the story prompts you for choices for other story characters, locations, plot devices and so on.

Throughout the app, the graphics are of an incredibly high quality, with a consistent and appealing feel and a great attention to detail. Everything about the app is designed to appeal to children, and it fulfils its intentions fully and fantastically. The sound effects are also of a very high quality, and both the narration and sound effects throughout the story are fun and clear.

At the moment, Mr Glue Stories is in a fairly early stage of development. This does not affect its very polished appearance and user experience, but at the moment there is quite a small range of just four stories to choose from. The app has a very useful supporting website, which includes detailed notes for parents, teachers, children and interestingly asks story developers to get in touch with ideas. Part of the future planning for Mr Glue Stories includes the potential for collaborating with authors and giving them a platform for publishing new stories.

As far as a child’s experience of using the app goes, they start by choosing the genre they would like, and then selecting a story from within that genre. The story then asks for their name and gender to place them into the story as the protagonist, and the story begins. The stories are split into 3 different difficulty levels, with children encouraged to differentiate for themselves. The story book then proceeds page by page, as with a traditional book, although each page is embellished with interactive choices, sound effects and the opportunity to draw on and colour in the pages of the book. You can also record a narration alongside each page, which is a great way to encourage children to read out loud.

At the end of the story you can choose to save, print or share the story. The printed version includes the child's drawings and all their presentations. The story then also appears as a separate entry in the main app “library”, which means children have new versions of the story available from which they can create different characters. The whole app is very impressive in its execution and it would be good to keep abreast of new content as it is added.