Playing Mathletics while wine drunk the other weekend was an enriching and informative experience, so I’m sure you can imagine my delight when scrolling through the site and stumbling upon its spelling version, Spellodrome. As someone who was an English/Literature kid, currently writes as their profession, and has a newly-realised passion of destroying tweens in educational games, I immediately knew that this was my destiny.
Spellodrome, much like its counterpart, involves racing school kids from around the world to – you guessed it – spell words correctly. You choose your grade, level of difficulty, and voilà, you could be racing 11-year-old Mario from the USA to spell the word ‘egg’. A simply phenomenal way to spend your time.
First up, I had to pose as a student in order to create my free trial account (bit rude that they don’t openly allow people in their 20s to battle kids in the spelling department, but I digress).
There was only one name that could do justice to my ambitious Spellodrome dreams and embody my passion to win, Kris Jenner.
With Kris on my side, I was ready to do amazing, sweetie.
Much like Mathletics, the sight of the global map immediately injected my soul with both excited nerves and schadenfreude, as I impatiently waited for my next victims.
Kris Jenner looked ready to rumble, and, hoo boy, was I ready to spell the shit out of these words.
Spoiler: I spelt the shit out those words…
And just like that, I fell down the worm hole of competitive educational games once more. I became entranced – galvanise to crush these ungrateful tweens with my correctly spelt words. The races immediately brought me back to the intense passion I felt when playing Mathletics in the classroom a good decade ago. One hour flew by. Two hours. I wanted to spell, goddamnit, and no one (not even you, Cindy from NSW) was going to get in my fucking way.
My confidence shone through. Kris Jenner continued to reign supreme.
Although, I must admit, I was slightly taken aback by the difficulty of the words in level 3 (the highest level), when asked to spell “arboreal”, “effervescence”, “cardiothoracic” and “obsequiously”. It’s clear that Spellodrome wanted to serve these year 5 kids a slice of humble pie, with or without me.
All in all, I wasted spent an incredible afternoon procrastinating on the site. I don’t know where this site was during my childhood – or why I hadn’t come across it before – but Spellodrome would’ve greatly improved my self-confidence and help to partly combat my crippling self-doubt as a 10-year-old who frothed spelling. Lucky for me, though, I can now use Spellodrome to greatly improve my self-confidence and help to partly combat my crippling self-doubt as someone in their 20s. Better late than never.
The game does have a couple of hindrances, I must admit. While Mathletics had, like, 9000 students on at one time, Spellodrome only had a handful, which meant that, if you were feeling really vengeful, you’d most likely compete against, and destroy, the same school kid over and over. (No offence Sally, but beating you time and time again became quite boring.)
Additionally, due to the limited amount of levels, if you weren’t on level 1 playing with words like ‘possum’, you’d most likely be asked to spell something along the lines of ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’. Not much in between.
But, if you were more of English student than a maths kid, this is the shit. A supreme quarantine activity.
And I’m happy to confirm that I’ll continue using both Mathletics and Spellodrome in isolation, after a rosé or 7, to virtually pulverise young kids. That’s until I run out of emails for free trials and decide to interact with society once again, but that latter part can wait.
