WORDPLAY: AROUND THE WORLD LEARNING
Children on the other side of the world are being educated from a small office in the centre of Sunderland. Thanks to the Support of Sunderland City Council, WordPlay Media has developed and provides a highly-engaging e-learning experience that is teaching the English language to Chinese youngsters. “When children are interested, learning happens,” is the ethos inspiring the work of WordPlay, an innovative e-learning technology company, based in Sunderland Software Centre. Ying Bradwell, chief operating officer of WordPlay, said: “We wanted to create a fun way for children to learn. Learning a language doesn’t have to be a chore, so we moved away from the textbooks and towards WordPlay. “WordPlay runs on three main platforms: stories, games and chatbot technology. Our stories are based on the curriculum, but they make learning both enjoyable and engaging. In one of our animated stories, we have a young Chinese boy and Eng- lish girl learning their respective languages with the help of a bilingual bunny – what more could a child ask for?” Language in the stories is appropriated to the English curriculum, with words mirrored by the animation. Alongside careful curation of witty stories, the team of four is also hard at work designing and creating fun games, crucial to the learning experience provided by WordPlay. Ying said: “Games enable the children to work on pronunciation, spelling, and so much more. We offer many different types: the action games target keywords and sentences of the English curriculum, word games record mistaken words and improve a child’s vocabulary, and syntax games use English recordings to foster understanding of the language. “They choose the areas they enjoy, or those they need to improve on, and go from there. We’re in the process of making the games more ‘fun’ – making it less like learning and more entertaining.” To find out more visit http://wordplay.media/en/