Hey Literacy Planet! Student from Endeavor Charter School here, which placed first in the national Word Mania contest last in the 2018-2019 school year. Now, I would first like to say that the game itself, although not by any means an innovative concept, can be fun for students and is, in some capacity, a useful tool for teaching literacy.
However, the digital layout of the app leaves MUCH to be desired. The interface is unpolished, and can be very blurry and hard to see on some devices. The app is in no way optimized for the iPhone 10 or 11, as the swipe-down Notification Center doesn’t move to the longer side of the phone. The game screen doesn’t even fill the entire screen of some phone, which can make it a strain on the eye to see and interact with the game. Perhaps a portrait orientation, along with landscape, could be added.
Many optimizations could be added to enhance the game, such as simply clicking or tapping letters to instantly put them in the word box, which counteracts the inherent disadvantage of playing on a laptop or PC, where dragging letters takes more time. I believe even the game itself could be improved, as when you know how to recognize a good set of letters (ie. Internationalist) you can easily make short words to build up to better tiles for your longer words (which often don’t fit in the completed word box).
As an eighth-grader, the graphical style is personally not to my taste, and many of my peers would agree. Simple changes could be made to streamline this and the app as a whole to make it really seem worthwhile to win a national contest. In all honesty, the game had two reviews before this one, and they were both quite poorly written. Developers, please take this advice to heart and help better this digital form of education. If changes are made, I will surely change my rating of the app, but at present I am sad to say I can not recommend it.
Also, of all the games by Literacy Planet on the AppStore, why are they all not optimized for more mature students and condensed into one app with Word Mania as the forefront?
Additionally, it would be great to see a global leaderboard for students and schools in-game, or at least a link to one online. A thought about marketing: many other games exist titled Word Mania, have you ever considered changing the name?
Thank you for your time and consideration,
RWC