“Playing With Words”: Effects of an Anagram Solving Game-Like Application for Primary Education Students

The present study reports the basic characteristics of a game-like application entitled “Playing with Words – PwW”. PwW is a single-user application where a word must be guessed given an anagram of that word. Anagrams are presented from a predefined word list and users can repeatedly try to guess the word, from which the anagram is derived, by placing (drag & drop) successively the given letters into the correct orthotactic order. Each effort is assessed as either correct or incorrect, while reaction and total time consumed are also recorded. The purpose of this game is both to entertain the user and to provide teachers with a simple computerized assessment tool. Summative evaluation results, based on 76 primary schoolchildren sample, indicate that the performance of anagram solving tasks explain a significant proportion of variance in reading fluency.