Spark
Spark Tales
A little firefly. A story full of wonder.
Spark Tales brings storytelling and sensory exploration together in a simple, interactive experience.
Flash the Firefly guides learners through a gentle journey filled with glowing lights, moving colors, playful effects, and familiar moments of anticipation.
Includes Spark Worlds · or included in the membership
The story begins with Flash appearing against a quiet black background. As the journey unfolds, different sensory scenes come to life — colorful music notes, glowing flowers, butterflies, floating lights, and other visual discoveries.
Flash provides a familiar visual presence as the story moves from one scene to another.
Instead of asking learners to follow a complicated plot or make difficult choices, Spark Tales offers opportunities to look, listen, touch, anticipate, and enjoy a story together.
The experience combines simple narration with visual effects and accessible interaction, allowing learners to participate in different ways.
It's a sensory story intended to be watched, explored, and shared.
Peek Inside
Follow Flash Through the Story
1. Meet Flash
Flash appears as a bright, glowing firefly against a black background, introducing himself and inviting the learner into the story.
2. A Little Music
Colorful musical notes float across the black screen, creating a playful scene of light, movement, and sound.
3. Flowers in Bloom
Large, softly glowing flowers fill the screen with overlapping colors and gentle visual effects.
4. More Worlds to Discover
The story can include other sensory scenes such as butterflies, dandelion seeds, bubbles, and flowing ribbons of color.
How it works
Spark Tales follows a structured sensory story rather than presenting unrelated effects.
1. Meet Flash
Flash appears against a dark, uncluttered background and introduces the story. His glowing presence provides a familiar visual target for the learner.
2. Follow the Story
The story progresses through a sequence of sensory scenes, combining simple narration, visual effects, and opportunities for interaction.
3. Explore Each Scene
Each scene presents a different visual experience, such as floating music notes, glowing flowers, butterflies, or other animated effects. Learners can enjoy the visual changes and participate through the interaction options provided by the app.
4. Continue the Journey
Flash and the story narration help connect the different scenes into a shared experience rather than a collection of unrelated activities.
5. A Gentle Ending
The journey leads toward a quieter conclusion, giving the story a beginning, middle, and end.
The predictable story structure allows learners to become familiar with the experience over repeated sessions.
Story Mode and Free-Play Sandbox
Spark Tales offers two distinct ways to enjoy its sensory worlds.
Story Mode
A guided sensory journey with Flash, narration, and an organized sequence of visual experiences. This is the main Spark Tales experience.
Free-Play Sandbox
An open-ended sensory experience that allows learners to explore effects without following the full story. This offers a more flexible option when an adult wants to focus on a particular visual experience or allow less structured exploration.
Make it your own
Teachers and caregivers can adjust Spark Tales to suit different learners. The available Story Settings include:
Story Controls
Choose which sensory scenes are included in the story using a visual Story Playlist — Music Notes, Flower Burst, Butterflies, and additional sensory effects.
Flash & Visuals
Customize Flash's appearance to create a clear, recognizable visual target, with a live Flash preview and several high-contrast color choices.
Audio & System
Additional settings allow the adult to configure the audio and system behavior of the storytelling experience.
Session Log
A Session Log section for reviewing information about the session.
Why I made it
I liked what the original Spark apps could do with a single touch — create light, movement, sound, and little moments of surprise.
But I wondered whether those same experiences could become part of a story.
Not a complicated story with lots of characters, dialogue, and things to remember. Just something simple that gives the visual experiences a little more meaning.
Flash seemed like the right companion for that. He's bright, familiar, and easy to find against a dark background. He can introduce a new scene, guide the journey, and provide something recognizable as the story continues.
A few musical notes become part of the adventure. Flowers appear. Butterflies arrive. Then the journey continues toward a quiet ending.
The learner can look, listen, touch, and share the experience without needing to understand every word of the narration.
Sometimes a story doesn't need very many words. A little light and a familiar firefly can do quite a lot.
What learners can explore
Spark Tales provides opportunities for:
- Visual attention toward a clear, glowing target
- Following moving objects and visual effects
- Looking between different parts of the screen
- Noticing changes in light, color, movement, and form
- Early cause-and-effect exploration
- Anticipating familiar parts of a repeated story
- Listening and attending to simple narration
- Experiencing an ordered beginning, middle, and ending
- Shared storytelling and participation with an adult
- Enjoying visual and auditory experiences at an individually appropriate pace
Spark Tales is an exploratory storytelling experience, not a formal assessment or a reading-comprehension task.
Who it's for
Spark Tales was created with learners with cerebral visual impairment (CVI), visual impairments, and complex learning needs in mind, but it's intended to be enjoyed by many different children.
Its high-contrast visual targets, simplified presentation, colorful sensory scenes, and adjustable settings provide different ways to engage with an interactive story.
It can also be enjoyed by young children exploring early storytelling, cause and effect, visual attention, and sensory play.
Teachers, therapists, parents, and caregivers can participate alongside the learner, narrating, responding, encouraging interaction, or simply enjoying the story together.
The goal isn't to get through the story as quickly as possible.
It's to make room for looking, listening, discovery, and shared enjoyment.
One little firefly. Many little discoveries. A story to share.
Includes Spark Worlds · or included in the membership
Part of the Spark collection — playful light, touch, and discovery.
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