Throughout my career I have gotten to read a lot of written content, and one thing that I have encountered (and guilty of myself at times) is spelling simple common words incorrectly.
What could I do about it?
To combat this I decided to make a “game” that would help eliminate common spelling errors and more importantly have helpful advise and information about the mistake you have made, so that you wouldn’t make the mistake again. I needed it to be lightweight, work on any device and look appealing enough for players to give it a go.
Introducing “Wordling”
Because nothing says “spell better” than a made up word. The game is simple, a player is presented with a word and simply asked if it is spelt correctly. The player then chooses yes or no, and the player either continues to the next word or gets some helpful information to try and correct their spelling in future. It’s worth noting this is a prototype at the moment. Below you can give it a go in all it’s codepen glory.
See the Pen Wordling : a Simple word game by Francois Marais (@francoismarais) on CodePen.
Where to from here?
Next up I will probably upload the project to github, before continuing to work on it. There is quite a bit to still do on this, even though it’s just a simple game / learning tool:
A back end needs to be integrated
I am toying with the idea to integrate similar concepts of flashcards and the three pile technique, where you will simply see the words you get wrong more often than the ones you don’t get wrong.
The scoring system will be explored and made public so players can challenge an motivate each other to beat each others streak score. Currently scoring is planned to be based on how many words you get correct in a row and the time it took you as the tie breaker.
Finally I need upload the fully functional version to the web where anyone can then access and play it.