Question Sleuth
Question Sleuth ($1.99), by Zorten Software, LLC, is a fun new app that will help you work on asking/answering questions, describing, categorization, and even articulation. The app is pretty similar to a favorite game of mine called Secret Square and I am sure if you have been in the field long enough you either own this game or have played it before. Question Sleuth is based on the same premise as Secret Square, where you have to hide a chip (in this case a star) under one of the pictures and the other player has to ask questions and systematically eliminate all the pictures until the remaining picture is the one with the star hiding underneath it.
The game comes with 120 "Tokens" (which are the pictures) across 10 categories. The categories include: cooking, animals, beach, clothes, food, instruments, party, sports, toys, and transportation. You can select from 2-45 tokens to be displayed at once.
The game offers and open-ended mode where the tokens can be manipulated. This allows you to have the child sort the tokens into categories, which may help younger children play the game. Zorten offers some examples of questions that can be asked:
- What is it? Is it a kind of food? Is it an animal?
- What can it do? Can it fly? Can you wear it?
- Parts of a whole: Does it have wings?
- Question form: Tell players to only ask questions beginning with "Is" or "Does", etc.
A neat feature about Question Sleuth is the ability to import your own pictures to use. You have the ability to import from the iPad camera roll or link it to your DropBox account! This opens up many possibilities. You can work on articulation, phonology, emotions, or even phonemic awareness. In the example below I imported initial /p/ words and had some of my client's work on finding the pictures with the starts with the /p/ sound.
