About us - Writelike

Work

Learning to write is hard. Teaching students how to write is even harder. So our mission is to help all students in Grades 5-12 learn advanced writing skills.

We do this through a unique combination of writers’ craft, teachers’ practice, educational psychology, and digital product design.

To date, we’ve made two complementary resources:

Writelike is a mentor text modelling resource. Like an interactive lesson library with peer feedback features, Writelike shows students how to find useful patterns in authentic texts and adapt those patterns to their own content.
Frankenstories is a fast-paced, multiplayer creative writing game. Like a cross between Gartic Phone & Theatresports, Frankenstories is designed to build engagement & enthusiasm for writing and channel that into developing stamina & skill.

Backstory

Writelike began nearly 10 years ago as a research project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One of our founders, Andrew, wanted to use ideas from cognitive load theory to create a kind of “voice gym” for writers.

Writelike was funded as a back-of-a-napkin prototype—the only non-U.S.-based project to receive the foundation’s LitChallenge grant, and one of only two projects to receive a second round of funding.

The problem was that the prototype didn’t work. Or rather, it didn’t work for average 5th graders. The cognitive load-friendly “voice gym” part was easy; filling knowledge gaps and sustaining engagement with middle-schoolers was hard.

With additional funding from Advance Queensland, we worked on Writelike on and off for over 7 years, experimenting with content & features, collecting feedback from teachers & students, and steadily making improvements.

At the end of that process, we came up with Frankenstories, a tool that perfectly complemented Writelike and solved the biggest challenge: how to make students want to write in the first place.

In 2021, once we felt we had all the pieces of the puzzle, we officially established Writelike as a company and really began to get to work!

Founding team

We are a multi-disciplinary team and we all wear several hats. Prior to launching Writelike, we worked together at Liquid Interactive on a range of multi-award-winning projects in education, health & digital public service design, including MindMatters, ESSI Money, Head to Health & Triple P Community.

Andrew Duval

Teaching & writing

Andrew has an MA in Scriptwriting from AFTRS, won an AWGIE award, has a Grad Dip Teaching from QUT & a Grad Cert Elearning from UTS, taught middle school (briefly), spent 10 years as a creative director working on education and social capability projects, won multiple Good Design Australia, AMY, AITD awards, and is a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantee. Andrew leads the team and writes many of the lessons.

Chris Goold

Coding & game design

Chris has a Masters in Digital Design from Griffith University and has worked with Andrew for more than a decade as fullstack developer. (This means Chris also has a bunch of Good Design, AMY, AITD awards, etc). He is also a fluent Japanese speaker, competitive gamer, and runs the largest Super Smash Bros. site in Australia, Ausmash. Chris builds everything.

Katrina Couzens

Linguistics & data

Kat has a BA in Linguistics from UQ and a background in improvisational theatre and immersive storytelling, including leading narrative design for Project Immersive’s award-winning escape rooms, and a multi-year stint writing for the Woodford Folk Festival Game. She also has extensive experience as a data analyst. Kat writes & edits lessons and wrangles data & other content.