Apps / Says Who? / User guide

Says Who? user guide

Everything the game does, why it is built that way, and what a grown-up can change. Written for the adult, not the child. The child does not need any of this to play.

Last updated: 11 August 2026

Contents

1. What the game is for

Says Who? teaches one habit: ask for a reason before believing something, and give one when you refuse. It is for children roughly 9 to 12, and it is a game rather than a lesson, because a child who is being taught to be sceptical will usually be sceptical about the teaching first.

The whole game is free. There are no adverts, no purchases and no accounts. It ships in English and Hungarian, and a child can switch between them.

2. A turn, step by step

A turn shows a claim and says who made it. A friend, a grown-up, an advert, a video, a post, the news, an old saying, a study, or the child themselves.

The child does two things, in this order. First they decide: I'd believe it, I'd say that's wrong, or Not enough to say yet. Then they pick the card that says why, from a small set of reasons.

Then the game scores both, tells the child which part they got right, and shows the other fair reasons they could have picked. A child who chose one good reason out of three gets to see the other two.

3. Why the reason scores more than the answer

This is the whole teaching design, expressed as four numbers.

  • 10 points, right decision reached by a fair reason.
  • 6 points, right reason but the wrong decision. The hard half done.
  • 3 points, right decision with a reason that does not support it. A lucky guess.
  • 0 points, neither.

So a right reason is worth twice a right decision. A child who guesses correctly and cannot say why has learned nothing, and a game that pays well for that has taught them that guessing works. A child who spots the real flaw and still draws the wrong conclusion has done the difficult part, and the game says so on screen.

Nothing is ever negative. Being wrong costs a child the points they did not earn, and that is the entire punishment the app administers.

4. The third button

Not enough to say yet is a real answer, not a way out. For some claims it is the only right one, and the game scores it exactly like any other correct decision.

It is there because the failure this game is really aimed at is not believing the wrong thing. It is feeling obliged to have an opinion at all. A child who can say "I don't know yet, tell me more" has the skill the rest of the game is built around.

5. Who said it

Every claim carries a badge saying where it came from. The source matters, but never decides. An advert can be telling the truth and a friend can be repeating something they misheard, so the game refuses to let "an advert said it, so it is wrong" win a turn. That rule is enforced by a check on the content itself, not left to the author to remember.

6. The path

The game is a path of nodes rather than a menu. A child works along it, and each node is one of a few kinds: a lesson of several turns, a review, a lab, a checkpoint, a chest, a milestone, and at the end, endless play.

Endless keeps going for as long as a child wants. A full endless round in which at least 70 percent of the answers carry a fair reason banks a gold crown.

7. Checkpoints

A checkpoint is the end of a unit, and the first thing in the game that can be failed. It is 10 questions, and passing needs a fair reason on at least 7 of them.

It counts reasons, not right answers. Everything else in the game scores the reason above the verdict, and a checkpoint that counted correct answers would quietly teach the opposite at the exact moment a child is trying hardest.

A child who misses is told how many they were short by, and can go again. Nothing is taken away.

8. Labs

Labs are small simulations a child runs themselves: a lever, a ramp, a pendulum, density, a circuit, and dissolving. Five are physics and one is chemistry.

They exist because the rest of the game asks a child to judge claims other people make, and a lab asks them to make one of their own and then check it. Predict, run it, see whether the prediction held, and pick the reason it did or did not.

9. What a child collects

Cards are the reasons themselves, and a child builds a collection of them. Badges mark things done well over time. Chests and milestones sit on the path as rewards for reaching them.

Gold is used for exactly two things, a crown and a chest, and never for decoration. If something is gold in this game, it was earned.

10. The grown-ups area

Behind a parental gate, so a child cannot wander in. It holds:

  • Players. Add or remove a child. More than one child can use the same device, each with their own progress.
  • Parent PIN. Set or change the code that guards this area.
  • Language. System, English or Magyar. The interface and the questions change together, and the change takes effect next time the app opens.
  • Read aloud. Has the questions and answers spoken, for a child who reads slowly or prefers to listen.
  • Reword scenarios. On devices that support it, gives a familiar scenario fresh wording so a child meeting it again does not simply recognise the sentence. It runs entirely on the device, nothing is sent anywhere, and the questions, the answers and the cards themselves never change.

11. What this will not do

It will not make a child sceptical about the right things. It teaches the shape of a good reason, using claims chosen to be safely arguable, and a child can carry that habit into a real argument or not.

It does not cover every kind of bad reasoning, and it does not try to. It is a game a child plays for a few minutes at a time, not a course in logic.

It also cannot tell you whether your child believes things they are told at school or online. Nothing an app measures will tell you that. What it can do is give the two of you the same words for talking about it, which is most of the value.