Wordle trend

 

For those of you who are frequent social media users (Read: Facebook and Twitter), you may have seen posts that look like the following:

Katapat 9 1/6

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 (solved it in one try!)

Latest news (1st Feb) 

As a language teacher, it is nice to see a simple word game that gets people to guess words and build up their vocabulary (assuming they find out the meaning of the words when they do not actually know them). The game also involves a certain degree of logical if not computational thinking. Some of you may be familiar with the board game below which feels a lot like Wordle but without letters of the alphabet. Instead, the Mastermind game gets a player to think carefully and strategically guess the colours that another player has set on the 'board' with clues on how many are at the right spot and whether the colours were present but not in the correct arrangement.

The viral game of Wordle is the one at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ (by Josh Wardle) but now there are similar sites which offer interesting variations. You can try guessing my 6 letters customised Wordle at https://mywordle.me/?word=arkhnl and then create a customised wordle for others to solve too. It could be useful for educators to customise a 5 or 6 letter word for their students to complete at the end of a lesson to emphasise an important keyword. This new custom wordle link is able to customise words of any number of letters.

Tougher EL ones include Dordle (2 words in 7 tries), Quordle (4 words in 9 tries) and Octordle (8 words in 13 tries).

Now, there are even 'Wordle-like apps for words from other languages.

Chinese/Mandarin: https://pinyincaichengyu.com/ or https://cheeaun.github.io/chengyu-wordle/

Arabic: https://arwordle.netlify.app/

Malay: https://www.projecteugene.com/katapat.html

Singlish: https://www.word-leh.com/

Update and other non-language subjects: 

Maths https://nerdlegame.com/ (by Richard Mann, from London) or https://www.mathler.com/ and 

Physics:https://physicswordle.web.app/?fbclid=IwAR3AO9q2edkDPVlrGhgbGHS5gKoEuD4RI_FruF4XkmFeqGObk0i4Dyia1v0

Geography at Worldle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

Singapore MRT, LRTs or schools at Geodle: https://geodle.vercel.app/sg-mrt-lrt

I was quite impressed that the Malay version was done up by a Chinese Malaysian. I have looked at the source code and am trying to make a variation called Tekata such that one can play with 4 or 6 letter versions. 

Last but not least, Deck Toys What Word is another example of companies riding on the Wordle craze to engage students in learning (even in other languages like Spanish in the screenshot above). I also saw some interesting ads recently using the Wordle idea and will share some of the thoughtful ones below.