I've just posted Concentration to the learning activities site.

The game includes a number of themes, including numbers, shapes and words. For the words theme in particular, there are also pronunciations, although unfortunately you'll need Quicktime with the Ogg plugin to hear them. This is mainly because the pronunciations are taken from Wiktionary, and Ogg is the standard format for sound files there. (I have nothing against Ogg, but it's not well-supported by media players yet.) Also, some of the words are missing pronunciations. I am wondering whether my voice is sufficiently up to scratch to fill in some of Wiktionary's gaps.

Despite taking the time to write the game, I don't know if games like Concentration have any ultimate educational value. I imagine it would be more likely to boost marks than video games such as GTA or The Sims, but only because those games involve practical problem solving, something that academic tests don't normally cover. As its name suggests, Concentration may help with attention and short-term memory. It certainly seems plausible --- there is some evidence games and activities like this can help delay dementia --- but I don't believe we have a good enough understanding of how attention develops and changes over time to make any strong claims.

In the case of the words theme, I believe that Concentration has the potential to help with spelling and pronunciation. At the moment, this version of the game involves finding pairs of commonly used words in English. When you reveal a word, you will hear the computer pronounce it. This creates a link between the visual and auditory forms of the word, if repeated often enough, which has the potential to improve both spelling and pronunciation.

Of course, there is more that I could do. One idea that I would particularly like to try is to use rhyming words, or words that have common prefixes, suffixes or infixes. Hopefully, this would not only reinforce the links the player makes, but would also reinforce common spelling rules. (When you think about it, English actually has a lot of useful spelling rules --- it's just that it also has a lot of exceptions.)