Language game app to take the pain out of learning

The growth of online learning products has created a
huge range of ways to learn a foreign language, from the
comprehensive-but-pricey Rosetta
Stone to a whole host of free services. However, a major
challenge facing such educational products is keeping learners
entertained and engaged in what can sometimes be the arduous task
of memorizing vocabulary and verb drills.  

Pollywords,
the first launch by educational gaming startup Erly Stage
Studios, uses the simple formula of a classic board game
to allow users with different language abilities to interact. The
free-to-play mobile app game, which bears a strong resemblance to
Scrabble, allows two users to play words from a number of languages
on the same board.

Erly Stage Studios founder and CEO
Farid Ul Haque believes the market for educational gaming has huge
potential, noting that the similar word-based Zynga title Words With Friends had up to
7.4 million daily users at its peak.
However, these products have seldom been launched on a major scale
for non-native English speakers.

“My mother speaks Arabic, my father
spoke very good Japanese, my friends speak Urdu, my brother-in-law
speaks Spanish, and I speak a little bit of Norwegian because of my
wife,” said Haque in an interview in Dubai. “When you have an
environment with so many languages being spoken, one of the things
you see is that most of the games are in English. It is a product
in itself being able to be able to accommodate players with a
broader range of languages,” he added.

The biggest use for Pollywords is
for people trying to improve their English but it is also useful
for English speakers learning foreign languages and non-English
speakers wanting to broaden their knowledge, he said.

Haque and his team started the
designs in December 2013 and launched the first version of
Pollywords in March this year. Two members of the team, including
Ul Haque, are mainly based in London, with another five in Karachi,
one in Manila, while the company is headquartered in Abu
Dhabi.

Erly Stage Studios has recently
completed its registration at TwoFour54 –
an Abu Dhabi media free zone – and has just closed its first seed
round, with funding mainly coming from friends and family. “It was
hard for us to drawn the line under what the minimum viable product
really was. It’s not just a game. We need to build these
dictionaries and an algorithm that can teach,” said
Haque.

Pollywords is being tested by 300
students at Cambridge International School in Dubai where
children, at Grade 8 level, are playing the game in Arabic, French
and English. Arabic and South Asian languages have been romanized
on the game to allow interaction between letters.

“There are a lot of great products
out there for [language learning].  But what we’re
specializing in is engagement with the language and vocabulary
building,” said Ul Haque. “This is about giving people the first
peek at a language and getting them interested and ultimately
hooked.”

Erly Stage Studios also sees Turkish
as an area with major potential and is aiming to roll out the
product in schools starting with a focus on London, Istanbul and
Dubai.

The initial launch is a
business-to-consumer (B2C) product and will happen in London, with
the potential for in-game advertising, with companies sponsoring
special ‘charactiles’ with their brands.

Following this, the
business-to-business (B2B) product called Pollywords Pro will be
launched and promoted through education trade shows, exploring
distribution deals with major publishers as well as going from
school to school in order to demonstrate the product. The business
model for Pollywords Pro is one paid subscription, per teacher, per
school.

The start-up is aiming to get
through Apple’s educational testing program and, after establishing
itself on Apple, launching an Android app further down the
road.

One notable feature of the app is
the crowdsourced dictionary where users are allowed to enter and
define new words in any language, which can then be approved by
other users (a minimum of 5 votes is required to validate the
word). The aim, according to Haque, is to create the world’s
largest multilingual, user-generated dictionary.

“We are creating a vast reserve of
data, which will be a massive asset. We are also looking into
derivative games that work on the same premise but are still a lot
of fun,” he said. “We’re going to open up the market for this
traditional game to a whole different audience. We track your level
of play, and an algorithm that checks what level you are playing
at, giving you tips to help you improve your
vocabulary. 

Haque has long been a video game
enthusiast and grew up playing simple games on the Atari and early
Nintendo consoles, but is now strongly committed to games that
deliver educational impact. “We wanted to try and make games that
have some sort of educational outcome. You feel like if you have
invested that time, it wasn’t time lost and you have learned
something new from it,” he said.