IMAPBOOK: Engaging Young Readers with Games

Glenn Smith, Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of South Florida (USF), pondered the challenge presented by the need to transform his research into a marketable product. For more than two years he had worked with doctoral students and his wife, Mieke Caris, to develop a platform for embedding games into online books. Classroom testing in the Netherlands and elsewhere had demonstrated the efficacy of the approach. The next step required was commercialization, without which the benefits of using the technology could not be realized on a broader scale.