Sentence Sensibility

Sentence Sensibility is a sentence constructing game for iOS (part of the Touch Press library). Students move word and punctuation tiles around to form complete sentences.  After an optional tutorial, students can choose a slow or fast-paced experience, and one of two modes. In the first mode, Unscramble, students have to place the words and punctuation in the correct order to form the sentence that the author originally wrote in works such as Little Women, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the Declaration of Independence. Dots appear next to correctly placed words, and students can continue moving words around until they arrive at the solution, accessing hints along the way. The sentence then appears with a few of the surrounding sentences from the original work (this is neat, but longer excerpts might encourage more interest).

In the second mode, Remix, students get the same sentences from the first mode but all scrambled. The challenge is then to take this scrambled sentence and re-order it to make as many sentences as possible in two minutes. As they form correct sentences, the game lights up different parts of the sentence to show things like noun and verb phrases, types of clauses, and other sentence parts. Long sentences receive bonus points, and users earn stars for completed rounds. Unfortunately, many sentences have limited subjects, verbs, and modifiers, so users may end up writing very similar sentences in Remix mode.

Sentence Sensibility can be a good support tool when working with students on forming complete sentences, but teachers will need to provide a lot of support if they want students to truly understand sentence structure and parts of speech. Using the game Remix mode as an introduction, teachers can help students understand how all writers do similar remixing when refining sentences as they draft. Playing with sentences in the game can also encourage students to write more detailed sentences in their own work, or spark some discussions about how language is used to convey meanings differently.

Since sentences don't have to make sense in order to be grammatically correct, teachers will want to monitor students' creations to ensure coherence, and then work one-on-one with students to explain issues in context. Also, due to the somewhat strange nature of the Remix mode, this isn't a tool I'd use for teaching parts of speech, but it can be useful for getting students to think about their own writing, perhaps even encouraging them to produce writing that's worthy of publishing. As it is, students may enjoy the fun spin on sentence creation, but there's not much depth, so teachers won't want to rely on this game long-term.