wordwall :Create better lessons quicker

wordwall Mission

We want creating your own resources to be easy.

Wordwall.net allows teachers to create interactive games and printed materials for their students. Teachers simply enter the content they want and we automate the rest.

18,753,954

Resources created

32

Templates available

32

Languages supported

History

It all began in a secondary school classroom in London (UK) in 2008.

For generations teachers have stuck laminated words on a wall to support literacy exercises. Whilst working as a teacher one of our founders created a program where you could simply type a list of words for the same purpose. He added a random picker with a spinning noise like a TV game show. This was the first version of Wordwall.

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Jobs

We are a small company with big ambitions. Our user base is growing rapidly with low churn and we’re already in profit. We’ve got a product that works and we’re building for the long-term. We want people who want to stick around and grow with us. Join us and help make learning more fun!

Find out more or apply now

Our technology

We use technology to make teachers' lives easier and to improve education of their students. This means software engineering is incredibly important at our company.

So whether you are a developer thinking of applying to work here, or you are just interested in how our site works. Read on to find out about the systems required for Wordwall.net to run.

Web application

The site is run using ASP.NET with the MVC pattern. Pages are generated using Razor. The server code is in C# .NET. This allows smooth integration with the game-engine which is also in C#.

Game engine

At the core of the product is the game engine. This our own technology that we've been building since the early days of the product. It comprises of two key elements. The game logic and the view.

The game logic describes each template. And for each template it lists a set of reusable units that describes how it should work. These units might share common jobs such as marking, drag-and-drop, toolbars and menus. The same unit might crop up in many different templates. This system makes developing new templates faster and ensures a consistency between each template so each feels familiar to the user.

The game logic describes each template in an abstract sense and dictates how they behave. But it's the view's job to visualise it for the user.

The view draws sprites over a layered parallax background. It utilizes the Canvas and Audio APIs found in every browser. We use XML mark-up to describe sets of graphics, sounds and animation sequences that we call themes. The same game screen can be made to look very differently by switching the theme. It's all fully responsive and will make sensible layout choices at all screen sizes.

Both game logic and view are written in C#. But they use a x-compiling technique to create two identical versions. One that can run natively on our servers and during automated testing, and one that can be delivered to the browser as a JavaScript file.