The wonderful world of WORDLE!

Wordle in three!

I wonder if you have spent the summer holidays in conversations with family and friends about the wonderful world of WORDLE??Or maybe you’ve seen the green/yellow/black tetris like patterns shared on social media??Maybe you are a little bit like me, and late to the Wordle phenomenon?

Wordle is a web-based word game developed by Welsh-born software engineer Josh Wardle. Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word; feedback is given for each guess, in the form of coloured tiles, indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position.?

Wardle initially created the game for himself and his partner to play, eventually making it public in October 2021. The game gained a large amount of popularity in December 2021 after Wardle added the ability for players to copy their daily results as emoji squares, which were widely shared on Twitter.?

As a family, the daily conversation about Wordle has connected us in most surprising ways.?I have been pleasantly surprised that this short, sharp game of literary skill has brought new conversations to the dinner the table with heated discussions around first-word tactics and double-letter strategies pondered and debated.

As an educator, the game feels like a ‘warm-up’ activity for an English classroom – something to get the neurons firing and your thinking cap on.?It feels like the modern version of the cryptic crossword my Dad used to complete in the Bulletin magazine each week.

A game that calls on you to consider options, strategise alternatives and predict patterns must be doing you good.

The beauty of Wordle is that it’s hard, but not too hard.?You don’t necessarily have be a literary genius to be good at it, but it absolutely makes you feel like the smartest person in the family when you are the first to crack the code!

And in a world of continuous and on-demand online content, I love the fact that there is only one Wordle per day.?There is something gloriously ‘old-school’ about having to wait 24 hours for the next challenge to drop.

If you haven’t already, I challenge your family to join the Wordle phenomenon.

Let’s improve our memory, attention and reasoning skills.?Let’s fire up those neurons for 2022, work on our brain health and prioritise a cognitively active lifestyle.??