Beaconhills College (Berwick Campus) is one of nine winners of the Word Mania – a competition helping to develop important literacy skills.
Run by LiteracyPlanet, the competition has Australian and New Zealand students in Years 1 to 9 race against the clock to help their school climb the leaderboard.
Students from 2,607 schools across 68 countries are tasked with dragging and rearranging letter tiles in only three minutes to build as many words as they can from a set of 15 randomly generated letters.
Beaconhills College Berwick Campus head of English and literature Clare Polglase said she was amazed by the school’s response to Word Mania.
“It was truly fantastic to see our students so enthralled with Word Mania,” she said.
“To see the students having fun and working together while advancing their spelling is very rewarding. And the friendly competitive spirit that came out is something we’ve missed in our classrooms.
“We’re so proud of our students for all their hard work, and absolutely thrilled for our school community to win Word Mania.
“We can’t wait to continue to benefit from using LiteracyPlanet in the coming year and we’ll be ready to win the 2023 competition.”
The schools competed for a prize pool of $150,000.
LiteracyPlanet chief executive officer Tom Richardson congratulated all the participants.
“Word Mania is first of all about having fun, but it is also about supporting teachers in driving interest, passion and understanding of words and language from their students,” Mr Richardson said.
“We’re so proud of Word Mania as an initiative that combines interactive gaming, a competitive environment and teamwork to engage students in their classrooms to improve literacy.
“We have been blown away, dazzled and enthralled by the competition and skill of students all around the world.”
All Word Mania records were broken this year with 4,790,865 games played and 14,372,595 minutes dedicated to developing spelling skills.
The highest score in a single game achieved 43,496 points and the longest word created was ‘Otorhinolaryngologists’.
The final round of Word Mania was completed from March 30 until April 1.
Winners from across the globe are on display via literacyplanet.com/blog/2022-word-mania-champs-crowned/
