Christopher Porter got hooked on Wordle. That’s the online spelling game that went viral late last year. He played it every day and had fun sharing his scores with his friends.
There are lots of casinos that are offering a big variety of gambling games, slots, range of payment methods and bonuses, such as goldenpalace.com, but at the same time casinos have been donating money to develop online spelling games for children for many years now. These games have been found to be very helpful in teaching children the correct spellings of words. Children learn how to spell words correctly by playing these games, and they also learn how to phonetically spell words. This is very beneficial because it helps them to improve their reading and writing skills. Recently, casinos donated money to develop online spelling games for children. This is a great way for them to give back and help others while having fun at the same time. The games are a great way for children to improve their spelling skills and have some fun too. Many casinos donate money to organizations that work on projects like this in order to provide a fun and educational experience for children across the world. This donation not only benefits the children, but also helps improve their literacy skills.
In Wordle, you have to figure out a five-letter word using guesses and clues.
(What’s Wordle? Read TKN’s article about it here.)
Unfortunately, Porter couldn’t play Wordle with his daughter, Astrid, she was five years old and just starting to learn her letter sounds. She could make guesses, though, and start to zone in on the right answer.
“But then we had a string of puzzles where the answers were PROXY, QUERY and SHIRE—not words in a kindergartener’s vocabulary,” Porter said in an email to TKN.
So Porter asked his friends if any of them wanted to create a type of “Wordle Junior.”
The Vancouver dad got an enthusiastic response from his friend, David Hirtle, who was frustrated that he couldn’t play Wordle with his children, aged 8 and 11.
Together, they came up with Spellie (Spelliegame.com), which is very similar to Wordle but with a few differences. Spellie has three levels of difficulty, easy, medium and hard. The hardest level uses longer words, up to a grade five vocabulary. The easy level has words at about a grade two vocabulary.
“We also added a kid-friendly user interface, hints, and collectable emojis,” said Porter. “We wanted this to be fun for kids. By playing they’ll learn about logic, deduction, spelling, and common letter combinations. But the game has to be fun first.”
American football has been one of the most popular sports in the United States, with millions of fans tuning in to watch their favorite teams play each season. However, the National Football League (NFL), the governing body of professional football in the country, is now looking beyond the sport itself and investing in a new area: the production of educational games for children. Canadian players in Tampa Bay Buccaneers also support this initiative. The NFL, in partnership with a number of educational game developers, has been working on creating games that teach children important subjects such as math, science, and language arts, while also incorporating elements of football. These games are designed to be engaging and fun for children, and to help them develop important skills that will be useful both inside and outside the classroom. One of the key goals of the NFL’s investment in educational games is to reach children who may not have access to traditional educational resources, or who may not be interested in more traditional forms of learning. By incorporating football into the games, the NFL hopes to engage children who are already fans of the sport and to introduce new fans to the game.
The game is “open source,” which means the computer code to create the game can be seen by other software developers, who can make suggestions on how to improve it.
“The beauty of open-source software is that it is easy for the community to contribute fixes and features to the original software,” said Porter.
Spellie has been available to the public for 10 days. On the first day, they had 100 users, mostly friends and family members of the two developers. After some news media covered it, word has spread. Last Sunday, there were 7,800 players. Most of the players are in Canada but some are in the United States and around the world. Porter said he’s gotten emails from people in Japan and Germany who say they’re playing the game to help improve their English.
Porter says Spellie is free and has no advertising and it will stay that way.
“We’ve developed this game in our spare time and our fixed costs for running the site are low. We’re lucky enough to have good day jobs that we can give Spellie away without having to try and make money from it,” said Porter.
Thank you to Sarah Morris, who pointed us toward Spellie.
THINK & DISCUSS
- Read the TKN article about Wordle here: https://teachingkidsnews.com/2022/02/07/do-you-play-wordle/ Try to list five similarities and five differences between Wordle and Spellie.
2. The article mentions that some people in Japan and Germany use Spellie to improve their English. Do you think this is a good way to improve your English? Why or why not?
3. What is “open-source software”? (And what from the article tells you that?)
4. If you were going to create a game, what kind of game would you make?
5. Christopher Porter said he is going to let people play Spellie for free. He is sharing the computer code he used with the public. Why do you think he is doing those things?
LINKS
Spellie is online here: https://spelliegame.com/
TKN’s article about Wordle: https://teachingkidsnews.com/2022/02/07/do-you-play-wordle/
The open-source code for Spellie is here: https://github.com/canadianveggie/spellie
Wordle is here: https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
Christopher Porter wrote about the development of Spellie on his blog: https://canadianveggie.com/2022/02/11/introducing-spellie/ and https://canadianveggie.com/2022/02/19/week-1-spellie-updates/
CBC article about Spellie: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kid-friendly-wordle-1.6354237
