Improve your English with Spell Up from Google

Earlier this month, Google released a new experiment for Chrome – Spell Up – a game designed to help improve your English language skills. Here at Digital Next we finally got round to trying the new feature out and have to say we were impressed!

The premise of Spell Up is simple: by utilising voice recognition, speech synthetic and the Web Speech API for Google Chrome you can now compete in a virtual spelling bee, with a twist. The game will ask you to use your microphone to spell out certain words of varying difficulty, stacking each word on top of each other to build the tallest possible tower of words.

As the height of your tower increases, the word challenges increase in difficulty. As well as being asked to simply spell words, Spell Up will also ask you to solve word jumbles, guess mystery words and pronounce words correctly. You also have the ability to earn bonuses and power-ups to help you as you build your word tower.

Google worked with game designers and teachers in order to make Spell Up fun, as well as educational. Since the initial release they have been encouraging teachers to use it in the classroom in an effort to get children more engaged with the English language.

Spell Up is designed for use with your Google Chrome browser, and works best on computers, as well as Android tablets and smartphones. If youwithre an iPhone or iPad user though donwitht fret, you can still play Spell Up, but you will have to type the words, rather than speak them.

As well as being a fun way to waste an afternoon, itwiths also an interesting to see how Google is using its innovations to target a wider audience, including school children and international users.

If you want to try Spell Up for yourself, you can visit Spell Up”