How I Built An Interactive Reading Game To Engage Reluctant Readers: Introducing SmorgasWorld
Last period last Tuesday, I leaned against my 7th grade ELA classroom bookshelf and watched Javi slip his phone under his desk for the third time that reading block. He’d checked out the same Percy Jackson graphic novel three weeks running and never turned past the first page. “If you hate sitting and staring at a paper book, why don’t you try the new thing on the cart?” I asked, nodding at the beat-up tablet cart by the door. He shrugged, stuffed his phone deeper into his hoodie pocket, and slouched over to check it out. Twenty minutes later, he was still leaning in, finger tapping the screen, and laughing out loud when the sardonic dragon on the screen called his answer “the most boring thing I’ve heard all century.”
That dragon is Smorgas, the companion for the little interactive reading game I built for my class after three years of watching smart, capable kids check out of reading entirely. I’ve been teaching middle school ELA for eight years, and the pattern never changes: about a third of my class can read at grade level or better, they just don’t want to. Commercial reading programs are just multiple-choice comprehension questions wrapped in cartoon skin; kids can tell it’s just homework with a different coat of paint. I mess around with beginner coding as a casual hobby, so I started tinkering with something different on my couch after my own 8-year-old went to bed, usually with cold leftover pizza on the coffee table next to my laptop. I named the dragon Smorg because I was eating a smorgasbord of takeout when I coded his first line of dialogue, and the name stuck. The whole thing became SmorgasWorld.
Today it has 300+ tiny interactive literary worlds, built around the books my students actually read. If we’re starting Where the Red Fern Grows, you can wander the Ozark hunting grounds before you read the first chapter, help Billy look for his ax, and listen to Smorg complain the whole time about getting mud on his shiny scales. If you just finished a chapter of Sherlock Holmes, you can poke around 221B Baker Street, open Holmes’ desk drawers, and listen to Smorg make fun of Watson’s messy, inaccurate case notes. There’s no pass or fail, no point system that goes on a report card. The only goal is to poke around the world of the book, make small choices, and see what happens.
After a month of having it up in my classroom, the small shifts started adding up. Javi finished the entire Percy Jackson world in SmorgasWorld after a week, then checked the full-length novel out of the school library and took it home. Mia, who has ADHD and can rarely sit through 10 minutes of continuous reading, started mapping her own version of Narnia in the back of her notebook after exploring the SmorgasWorld version during free period. A parent emailed me last month saying her son, who’d refused to touch any book longer than 20 pages for two years, started bringing home the Dog Man books we have a world for, just so he could unlock the hidden treehouse side quest after finishing each chapter.
The biggest thing this little experiment has taught me is that we’re usually asking the wrong question when we talk about reluctant readers. We spend all our time looking for “the right book” that will hook them, and that matters, but we rarely stop to ask why reading feels boring next to every other thing kids do these days. They’re used to interacting with their media: making choices, changing outcomes, poking around instead of sitting passively and absorbing. Reading can feel like a chore when the only interaction you get after is answering questions about the theme for a test.
You don’t have to code a whole game to bring that energy to reading at home or in your classroom, either. There are small, low-effort changes anyone can make. Next time your kid or student finishes a chapter, don’t start with “what happened in this chapter?” Ask “if you could add one place to this story’s world that the author didn’t include, what would it be?” If you’re starting a new book, spend 5 minutes before you begin talking about what you think the main character’s bedroom looks like, instead of jumping straight into vocabulary words. Let kids skip ahead if they’re curious about what happens next, instead of scolding them for ruining the story — curiosity about the world is what makes them want to go back and read the parts they skipped. I also learned that a little snark goes a long way: kids can spot fake peppy enthusiasm from a mile away. A grumpy companion that complains when you make a silly choice feels far more real than a cheerful cartoon that claps for every answer.
It’s not a perfect system. I’m not a professional coder, so there are still glitches: last week Smorg’s dialogue got stuck repeating “that’s a really dumb choice” for 10 minutes straight, and I had to restart the whole server in the middle of class. I still add new worlds slowly, one a week, based on what my kids ask for. Last week Javi told me Smorg needed more dragon puns, so I added a dozen this weekend. I’ve been thinking about making it free for other teachers to use, but I’m in no hurry — it’s still a work in progress, built for my classroom first.
I still find phones hidden under desks during reading block. I still have kids that turn up their nose at every book I suggest. But these days, more often than not, those same kids will wander over to the tablet cart after they finish their work, tap into SmorgasWorld, and spend 20 minutes wandering a literary world, laughing at Smorg’s bad jokes. That’s more than any expensive reading program ever gave me. It’s not a fix-all for low reading engagement, but it’s working, one small exploration at a time.
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