Good Way to Improve Spelling Skills

While I personally found this game very easy because I can spell decently, I think this can be a great educational game for grade school children who have trouble with spelling. It may not be entirely a fun way of learning spelling, but it sure beats being quizzed over and over by a parent. I found it a fun challenge to try and get to the top rank of 100. To improve your rank you play the spelling challenge that starts with a spelling bee and then has different spelling games. Your rank can go up 1, 2 or 3 levels depending on how well you do on the challenges. Also, at the end of the challenges you can try to gain another rank point by taking the final spelling bee challenge of three words, but if you miss just one you not only do not get the point, but you lose the rank points you just earned in the spelling challenge.

I found the spelling bee part very easy as it flashes the word and then you just have to spell it using the keyboard on the touch screen. Some of the challenges are easy while others are hard. I found the word scramble one kind of difficult as I progressed in rank because the definitions of the words you had to spell with the tiles do not always make the most sense. There is also a Wheel of Fortune like challenge that was also hard due to the poor definitions. One of the easy challenges was the Bomb blast one in which you choose the words that are spelled incorrectly out of 4. There was also one that you choose which of two words was the correct spelling and I found that easy to do.

There are two main issues I have with this game, although I still thought it was fun to play and pretty easy to at least figure out how the different challenges work. The first issue I have is that the touch screen keyboard is in alphabetical order. It made it difficult to quickly spell words, which with the timer was sometimes important, because I am so used to a computer QWERTY keyboard layout. After thinking about the targeted age group being kids I thought well maybe the choice of keyboard layout is okay for the game, but these days even many kids are learning the keyboard layout at a young age.

The second issue I have with this game is more of a suggestion of what I wish it did. I was surprised to see that the spelling bee mode flashes the word and then you spell it. I think it would be better if you had to turn the sound on and the word was spoken and then you had to type it in. You know kind of like an actual spelling bee. Maybe, this just is too hard of something to be done for the DS, but I doubt it.