Mark Schlichting (born March 17, 1948) is a publisher, author, and digital pioneer of children's multimedia and interactive design software.
[2] He soon became head of the team of the new division called Living Books, where they first began adapting Mercer Mayer’s Just Grandma and Me and Marc Brown’s Arthur’s Teacher Trouble and the original Living Books game Harry and the Haunted House by Mark Schlichting himself into interactive children’s software.
These interactive animated digital children's books were the first of their kind and included the option of a “read-through”, where the user could digitally turn the illustrated “pages” and hear a narrator read the text, and the “interactive” version, where users could click around on each page to find and activate dozens of animated sequences, often accompanied by music, sound effects, or dialogue.
[3] Under Schlighting's supervision, NoodleWorks Interactive has worked with children's learning and entertainment companies and projects such as LeapFrog, eScore - Learning Centers, Pearson Broadband (Educational Division, London), Fisher/Price, Snicker Interactive Toys, Serosity, Electronic Arts (EA), LBS Alchemy, and more.
[8] For the iOS app, Schlichting worked with Wanderful in adapting the original Living Books CD-ROM to take advantage of the new touch-screen format, so that "virtually everything" on a page that looked "tappable" could be tapped to "come to life" and activate an animation, sound, or other interactive element, including tapping on the individual words of the text.