"SuperWriter!" was designed for John Reed's ninth and tenth grade classes at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf in Providence, RI. The students exhibited a wide range of writing ability. The students will have some familiarity with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, but it is not necessary to play the game. The tutorial portion requires no background and functions especially well as a stand-alone.
This is a two-part program. The first part is an extensive flip-card tutorial covering the rudiments of formulaic essay writing (the thesis, paragraph formation, transitions, introduction and conclusion). The second part is an adventure game in which students navigate around a city doing research on Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They use the information to form essays with rigidly structured on-screen assistance.
The tutorial portion of SuperWriter! presents "superheroes" as metaphors
for the different components of the essay and mistakes that can be made in writing. The adventure part of the program provides reinforcement and repetition of the components and methods of writing a 5-paragraph essay aiming to make the experience both fun and memorable. Students can work at their own pace and will reach a tangible goal at the end.
While "SuperWriter!" is a game intended for a specific group of students with special needs, it can serve as either tutorial, review, reinforcement, or entertainment for all ages and levels of writing (within reason, of course).