Why we built AgentChamp™

I was the child who wouldn't read.

Not because I couldn't - because nothing I was given felt like it was for me. School stories were long, worn out, and about things I didn't care about. The only books I ever finished were Goosebumps: short, exciting, and mine.

Then, when I was ten, my classmates were given The Hobbit. At break and lunch it was all they talked about - dragons, riddles, a burglar hobbit - and it sounded like nothing I'd ever heard of. A book that sounded exciting. So I asked my teacher if there was a copy left for me.

He said I wasn't a strong enough reader for it.

I still remember how that felt. Luckily, my parents recognised something my teacher didn't - that this was the first time I'd ever asked for a book - and they bought me my own copy. I couldn't put it down. The Hobbit is still one of my favourite books today, partly because it's a great story, and partly because it holds the feeling of the first time reading ever grabbed me. The boy who wasn't a strong enough reader went on to study English Literature at university.

Years later I became a primary school teacher, and for nine years I watched the same thing happen from the other side of the desk. Children labelled reluctant readers who weren't reluctant at all - they'd just never been handed a story that felt like theirs. Children bored by page three, made to push on to page ninety anyway. Comprehension work about stories they'd already decided they hated. (I once had to sit an assessment about ducks in a pond. Why? I don't know, but I do know that it didn't do much for my love of reading.)

Every day that I was teaching I asked myself the same question: what would ten-year-old me think of this? Because if ten-year-old me would have switched off, some child in front of me already had.

AgentChamp is my answer. Short, complete, mission-sized stories, so no child is trapped in a book they stopped enjoying. Choices that change the plot, so the story feels like it's theirs - because it is. And stories about anything a child loves, written at the level they read - so no child ever gets told the exciting book isn't for them. Levelling, done right, isn't a gate. It's a promise: whatever grabs you, we'll meet you there.

Everything in AgentChamp - the missions, the choices, the six endings, the stories written just for one child - exists to cause a single sentence: "I found a book that I love."

I built the reading platform ten-year-old me needed. It turns out a lot of ten-year-olds still do.

Warren ByeFounder - primary school teacher for nine years