98% of the world's languages have no literacy game apps available. Children who first learn basic literacy skills in their home language will be more successful when they transition to literacy in regional and national languages.
Our platform facilitates the creation of a basic literacy games app for Android that is free and works offline. The app can be created in as little as one week.
The Alpha Tiles app can be built with as many as 120 games ordered from easiest (picture matching) to hardest (spell from memory). All games are at the word level or below. It can be used in informal or formal learning and for child or adult literacy.
We are currently running a pilot test for the 2022-2023 school year for 185 students in a bilingual (Spanish, Me'phaa) primary school. By March 2023, students were on average outperforming the baseline scores (September 2022) of students two to three years older (e.g. 2nd graders (Mar 2023) outperforming 6th graders (Sep 2023)).
The Alpha Tiles code is open source.
The Alpha Tiles app is being tested in 51 languages with a median of 30,000 speakers. Another 117 teams have begun the process of creating a "language pack" for a new localization of Alpha Tiles. The app correctly handles Roman and Thai scripts. Arabic and Devanagari script support is in development.
In the next 2-3 years, we want to develop a web version of Alpha Tiles that further simplifies localization of the app into new languages. This would be in addition to (not replacing) the Android version. The web version would also allow the creation of print resources (e.g. downloading five unique word search pages for a particular language).
To start creating Alpha Tiles in a new language, email alpha_tiles@sil.org.
