App Review: Shake-a-Phrase from ArtGig
By Ryan Orilio, Apple Distinguished Educator
Shake-A-Phrase, from ArtGig, is a young learning app that teaches parts of speech in an engaging and fun way. As an app for children ages 6-12, Shake-a Phrase is a good tool for teaching parts of speech and language, but I feel like the app has not yet reached it’s potential.
The app can be used in three modes. “Shake it” will shake up a silly sentence for you to read and identify the parts of speech. “Story Starter” generates a silly question for you to answer. It is an attempt to start a funny story and have the user finish it. “Quiz Me” generates a random sentence and asks the user to identify parts of the sentence.
When using in “Shake it” mode you can select from 5 themes for the sentences: Sports, Monsters, Fairytale, Animals, and the Shake Starter. An example from the Fairytale theme: “The noisy and witty wolf grabbed a stinky orphan.” That is great because it allows children to learn and play with words and phrases that they may already be a bit familiar with.
When you touch a word in the sentence, the app highlights the word, identifies the part of speech, and offers a definition of the word. It would be great if the definition of the word was able to link to a WWW search, but it does not. According to ArtGig there are more than 2000 words that the app has to choose from, which means that it will be a long time before you run out of new sentence combinations! However, the app will only let the users identify nouns, adjectives, and verbs. So there are words in every generated sentence that cannot be tapped on for identification.
The “Quiz Me” mode is where I spent most of my time when I was playing with the app. It is fun and engaging. You receive a random sentence and are asked to identify the verbs, or nouns, or adjectives. You tap on the correct words and they turn green. Tap on the incorrect ones and they turn red. Some sentences have only one correct answer and some have multiple. Answer a certain number of questions correctly and you advance to the next level.
However, one thing that bothered me about the quiz was that I didn’t get any awards for completing a level. I wasn’t even able to look at a scoreboard to see what level I made it to the previous time I played. These are definite oversights that I would like to see addressed in future versions of the app.
The “Story Starter” mode seems to miss the mark more than the “Shake it” or “Quiz Me” modes. All that happens is a question or statement is randomly generated that begins with “Imagine…”, “What would happen…”, or “What if…” If the goal is to begin a silly story, then I think that a better approach would be to begin with an actual story starter instead of a question. Something like “A pretty girl gets lost in the dark forest. Then…”
Lets recap the positives and negatives here: Shake-a-phrase is a cheap, easy to use tool. It is useful with a moderate range of children, and teaches the basic parts of speech well. It offers a wide range of sample sentences of which many will prove to be quite memorable. Shake-a-phrase can be used at school or home, and is available on both the iPad and iPod and iPhone devices.
However, the app disregards other parts of speech (adverbs, pronouns, conjunction, preposition, interjection). It lacks the ability to add my own words and phrases to what is used in the sentences. Perhaps some sort of adjustable difficulty for different levels of children would also be handy. I’d also love to see some text to speech functions for students with disabilities.
Overall, this is a solid app for teaching the basic parts of speech. It is probably ideal for ages 6-10, but with some updates could work with students through middle and high school. While it is well designed, easy to use tool, I feel that with some improvements, It could be a killer app. Shake-a-Phrase is available from the App Store for $1.99 for the iPhone and iPad.
