Phonogram Game

I've gotten to a good resting point in my GameMaker game. I've been working on it for almost three weeks, and it has come a long way. My brothers (long time professional programmers) would probably cringe at my coding, but I'm extremely proud of it. The graphics aren't fancy, but the functionality is what I envisioned.



Sparkle was the first to test the program (an earlier version).



I showed an earlier version of the program to another homeschooling mom on Tuesday. My fingers were crossed because until then I had only shown it to Sparkle and Wander. When the other mom first saw it, she instantly knew what it was for and wanted to know how to get it.

The idea behind this little computer program is to spell words using Orton-Gillingham phonograms. A phonogram is letter or set of letters which represent a sound. To spell a word, you identify the individual sounds in the word, and then write the corresponding phonogram for each sound. Several spelling programs use this approach, including The Writing Road to Reading by Romalda Spalding, Spell to Write and Read by Wanda Sanseri, and All-About-Spelling by Marie Rippel.

These spelling programs also recommend starting with a young child - kindergarten age. However, many young children aren't up to handwriting a long list of spelling words. Some homeschool parents use Scrabble tiles or magnetic letters to spell words. However, physical tiles are easily lost and mixed up. Physical tiles also provide a limited supply of each letter. Cheap tiles also are usually available only for the alphabet, not phonograms.

So, here's my program. All of the phonograms are represented. There is an unlimited supply of each phonogram. The tiles are always sorted and never lost. The child doesn't have to do any handwriting. There are upper and lower case letters. Each tile is sized to fit the number of letters in the phonogram.