WORD FORCE
MY ROLE: Creative Direction, UX, Game Design, Lead Designer, Character Design, Voice actor for Unicorn man and the Narractor.
WORD Force is an Early Literacy app teaching the foundations of reading. It was originally designed for kids who had fallen through the cracks and were a little bit older than most “learn to read” apps were designed for. It has since been adopted by many curriculums as a foundational reading tool.
WORD Force follows the adventures of a team of friends who live in a space station treehouse and help to solve global issues, all while learning to read!
They comprise of:
Unicorn Man!
Ed Trotter, a mild-mannered ordinary Unicorn by day, when duty calls he transforms into…. UNICORN MAN! He uses his magic horn to cast spells that allow him to help those in need whether it be saving a town from an imminent volcanic eruption or helping a child learn to read.
Tina the Turtle!
Tina is a master inventor and engineer. Her history is a long line of firsts. First turtle to fly across the ocean. First turtle to fly to space. First turtle to complete a marathon in less than 2 hours (with the help of her bionic turtle legs). Tina now uses her abilities to maintain the space station and help people to see that they can do anything they set their minds to!
Capn’ Taco!
Chosen by the Intergalactic Taco Federation as the Ambassador to Earth (or at least that is what he claims), Cap’n Taco’s mission is to see that everything on earth can learn to read and appreciate tacos. The Cap’n takes everything seriously and the one word he can’t spell is quit!
Octavia Octopus!
Bubbly and happy by nature, Octavia is always looking for ways to help those around her. Octavia is always joking and trying to turn everything into a game! Octavia can use her many arms to do 8 times as much as an eel can, and she has dedicated her life to using her arms to spread hope and joy.
The Clump!
The mysterious Clump was discovered in the space station when the rest of the WORD Force found it. Some say he is one of an ancient race who have long been protecting humans from themselves… some say he came from the drain in the space station shower. He is learning to read along with the students and has recently added the word DETERMINATION to his vocabulary!
Games
The WORD Force app is comprised of 15 games that teach foundational literacy skills. Each game has five levels of difficulty. When games are completed successfully, the learner can graduate on to harder levels, they earn items that can customize the heroes rooms, and they slowly repair their injured space station.
Here are just a few of these games:
The Dictionary Dig: Vocabulary
In this mission, students join Octavia the Octopus in rescuing Unicorn Man from the center of the Earth. They will hear a word and its definition and match it to the correct picture to power Octavia’s rescue vehicle.
This game helps students develop knowledge of Tier II vocabulary words by being taught new words and then matching the new vocabulary words to appropriate pictorial representations of the words.
Cotton Candy Breakdown: Phoneme Segmentation
In this mission, students join Captain Taco in an urgent call to save the city from the cotton candy monsters. They hear a word broken into its segmented sounds and try to find the hidden picture that matches the sounds to clean up the cotton candy mess.
This game helps students to develop phonemic awareness skills by listening to words segmented into phonemes (/b/ /a/ /t/) and matching the segmented sounds with the corresponding word.
Stellar Speller: Word Building with Onsets and Rhymes
In this mission, students join Tina the Turtle to repair the WORD Force communication satellites. They hear a word and see part of the word already on the satellite. They repair the satellite by completing the word.
This game helps students develop skills in spelling words with common spelling patterns by matching onsets and rhymes (e.g., b+ake = bake).
Icy Letter Ladders: Spelling
In this mission, students join Octavia the Octopus in an adventure to reunite polar bear families stranded on ice floes. They will be tasked with changing one sound in a word to another to build an ice ladder so the polar bear can cross the icebergs and get to its babies.
This game helps students develop knowledge of relationships among words by manipulating a letter in one word to spell a new word.
Conserve-a-Word: Sight Words
In this mission, students join The Clump in a quest to turn off all the unused lights in town and save energy. They briefly see and hear a word and then go into the correct window to spell the word, which will turn the lights off in that building.
This game helps students develop knowledge of high frequency and sight words by hearing and seeing words and then spelling them.
The Robot Recycler: Building Words with Digraphs
In this mission, students join Tina the Turtle in a task to assemble and fix the city’s recycling robot. They will hear the word and see a matching picture and then spell that word on the robot to get it working again. When all of the words are completed the body parts are put together into a Voltron-like super robot that does a fancy dance.
This game will help students develop skills in spelling words with consonant and vowel digraphs.
The Suffix Summit: Inflectional Endings
In this mission, students join Captain Taco in an expedition to help the bored goats get some fun in their lives. They see a word that is missing the correct ending. They have to read the sentence and fill in the correct ending to start dj’ing for the dance starved goats. As levels are completed the goats climb the mountain until reaching the ultimate party.
This game will help students develop comprehension skills and knowledge of inflectional endings by reading the target sentence and selecting the inflectional ending that makes the sentence correct.
Solar Sentences: Reading Comprehension Commands
In this mission, students join all of the heroes in the WORD Force on a journey to get across the outback. They read commands and follow those commands by getting in the correct driving lane that leads them to safety.
This game helps students develop comprehension skills by reading short commands and then performing those commands in a game-like environment.
Level Select
The learners can either play the deepest level they have reached or repeat levels to try for a perfect score. As they trave on their journey they can watch videos (see below) to aid them on their journey.
Game Select
Literacy concepts are gated for learners. Learners are not able to progress to more complicated literacy concepts until they have reached a threshold of success with earlier games.
Customizable Rooms
Successful completion of games earns learners the ability to customize the heroes bedrooms!
Customizable Avatars
Everyone needs a helper on their heroic journey and WORD Force is no different. Learners can choose who their helper is and customize their appearance.
Intervention Lesson Videos
Accompanying the games are videos that are either unlocked at milestones throughout the level progress or appear if the app detects that the learner is struggling with a concept. We made more than 50 of these videos!
Parent / Teacher Portal
On both the mobile app and the student portal there were robust tools to follow the progress of learners if desired.
