🥅 Jack's Match

Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear

What this is

A two-half football match that trains the two halves of literacy: decoding in the first half, spelling in the second.

The first half is a playable version of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, the statutory assessment in English primary schools. In it, children read 40 words, half of them pseudo-words — made-up but phonically regular strings like fod or shob, presented as alien names. The point of the nonsense words is that they cannot be recognised by shape or guessed from the first letter, so they show whether a child is genuinely decoding rather than remembering. This game puts the same idea on a pitch: real word → shoot at goal, alien word → give it to the alien.

Crucially the app does not read the word out first. Hearing it would turn decoding into listening. It speaks the word after a correct answer as confirmation, and after a wrong one it sounds the word out and brings it back later in the half.

The second half is dictation: the app says a word and the child types it on an on-screen keyboard with no letters supplied — the sequence has to come from memory.

⏱️ First half — real word or alien word?

🥅	A real word → tap GOAL
👽	A made-up word → tap ALIEN

Alien words in the pool: fod · zat · bep · vum · shob · chid · thog · keeb · narp · quog · sprot · dree

Stuck? 🔊 Sound it out reads the graphemes — sh-i-p, not s-h-i-p — but never the whole word. That part stays with the reader.

⏱️ Second half — write the word

🔊	Listen to the word
⌨️	Tap the letters — no tiles, no clues
✅	Correct letters stay put, the rest clears, try again
👻	After two attempts a faint ghost word appears
⚽	Spell it and the crowd goes up

🏆 Full time

The whistle blows, the goals are counted, and the best score so far is remembered.

🎯 What it practises

• 🔍   Blending sounds through a whole word instead of guessing from the start
• 🧩   Recognising digraphs (sh, ch, th, oa, igh) as single sounds
• ✍️   Producing a spelling from memory, not from a choice of tiles

⚙️ Notable details

• The keyboard is in ABC order by default — a five-year-old hunts through the alphabet, not a QWERTY layout. A setting switches it.
• A missed word is pushed back into the queue so it comes round again, but the queue is capped so the half always ends.
• Grapheme splitting is greedy and digraph-first, which is what makes the sounding-out correct.

🎈 The other games

Game	What it is
📖 Jack's Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play
🥅 Jack's Match	Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear	▶ play 👈 this one
✏️ Jack's Letters	Finger-trace all 26 lowercase letters in the correct stroke order	▶ play
🔢 Jack's Numbers	Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20	▶ play
💯 Jack's Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All eight on one start page: jackbenn.ing

🛠 Built like this

Every game in this organisation is one self-contained index.html — no build step, no framework, no package manager, no analytics, and no network calls once the page has loaded. That is a deliberate constraint: a game a child depends on should still work in five years, and a parent should be able to read the whole thing in one sitting.

• Speech — the browser's Web Speech API, preferring a British English voice. It always waits for a tap first, because Chrome and iOS block audio without user activation.
• Progress — kept in localStorage on the device. Nothing is collected, sent or stored anywhere else.
• Made for an iPad mini in either orientation: finger-sized targets, no hover-only interactions, prefers-reduced-motion respected.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000

The start page at jackbenn.ing is built from google814/Jack, which is the source of truth. The repos in this organisation are copies kept in step by tools/sync-game-repos.sh in that repo, so each game also has its own page and its own link.