spelling

Your Android phone or tablet can be a great educational tool for your kids, with the right software. Softdiv's Animals Spelling Game For Kids is a super-easy game designed to help kids just learning how to spell with simple, familiar words. And what better source than animal names, which tend to be short and easy to spell but exotic enough to both challenge young learners and keep them interested.

Animals Spelling Game's main page has three buttons: Play Game, Top Score, and Exit. We started a game. Our first puzzle presented three letters; D, G, and O, above … Read more

It's hard to know whether those who can't spell are stressed, oppressed by excess multitasking, or merely uneducated.

The people behind the highly nutritious Snickers bar decided to prove that it might be none of the above.

It is, they posited, merely hunger that drives you to ignorance.

So, as AdAge reports, Snickers got together with Google to see whether they could encourage better spelling of Google search terms, as misspelling was causing Google's servers to seize up and spew smoke and curses.

I made up that last part.

As part of the campaign, the Snickers-sponsored machines … Read more

When Chrome's engineers sat down to plan out feature updates, who would've thought that "spell-checker" would've been anywhere on that list?

Google Chrome 26 stable for Windows (download) and Linux (download) updates the browser's ability to automatically check for spelling and homonym mistakes with new dictionaries.

Chrome 26 for Mac (download) has received the other Chrome 26 updates, but the spell-checking feature will be made available later, Google said in a blog post. The company did not specify a timeline for the feature, and unfortunately, it will not correct inaccurate spelling already published elsewhere … Read more

The App Store is filled with games and learning tools for children at varying levels of quality. Some are effective but bogged down by messy menus or too many ads. Others are pretty but offer ineffective learning tools that children will only find confusing. Buddy's Read and Spell Lite manages to steer clear of both of these traps to offer an intuitive, fun-to-play game for children that is heavy on learning and whimsy, but light on the distractions and ads that so often bother parents.

After starting the app, children have only one option: to play the game. The … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Instagram 3.0 adds infinite scrolling, lets you plot on a Photo map.

- How to control which Instagram pics show up on your Photo Map.

- Hipstamatic lays off all but six employees.

- Hipstamatic becomes the first third-party app to officially post photos to Instagram.

- Buzzfeed invites you to rub Ryan Gosling. Learn the Moonwalk from MJ too, while you're at it.

- From a visual perspective, RubGifs still don't compare to cinemagraphs.

- Google US map shows regional stereotypes by autocompleting "Why is ____ so..."… Read more

Sorry, Harry Potter fans, you're going to have to double double toil and trouble somewhere else besides eBay. The online auction giant has just issued category changes and updates for the fall. Spells and potions are on the dump list.

Discontinued categories include Tarot readings, spells, and potions. Not only are some categories magically disappearing, but those items will go onto eBay's prohibited list along with hexing, curses, conjuring, blessings, psychic readings, and the catch-all "magic services."… Read more

Spellsword is an excellent and almost blindingly fast-paced arena-combat arcade game with addictive RPG elements, super-cute 16-bit fantasy art, and often hypnotic chiptune sound.

At first glance, Spellsword shares some similarities with another great game, Super Crate Box: Both have you dodging enemies and chasing powerups around a satisfyingly cramped playscreen--but Spellsword adds a couple of twists, with a mini RPG-style purchasing system (you collect "rupees," which you can then use between levels to buy equipment and make your powers more effective) and a unique take on power-ups with "spell cards." As you bounce around the (… Read more

Spelltower is a well-made word-puzzle game with a stylish feel and enough built-in variants to justify its price tag.

The gameplay should be familiar to word-game fans: you find words on a grid of letters, which you can trace over horizontally, vertically, or diagonally (even overlapping the path that you trace) to form words and remove the letters. Spelltower's innovation is stacking its grid in a tower--so that when you create a word, you remove all adjacent letters, dropping down all the letters above accordingly. This adds another satisfying layer of think-ahead strategy, as you're looking for not … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Call it a toy, call it an experience, but I'm not sure you should call it a book. The J.K. Rowling-created "Book of Spells," the launch title for Sony's Wonderbook platform announced at E3 2012, was originally touted during the kickoff Sony press conference as being a way to bring reading to life.

I had a chance to check out the Wonderbook at Sony's E3 booth, and I'm not sure reading really entered that much into the equation. It is, however, a fun augmented-reality toy with some beautiful animations. … Read more