South Africa’s AppCRAFT has come up with an easy and interesting way to help English language learners to become literate. The organization’s eLiteracy app was selected as a finalist in the Life Improvement category of this year’s Calling All Innovators contest.

If you are reading this article, then you do not need eLiteracy for yourself. However, someone you may know — from a child learning literacy for the first time to an adult who is unfamiliar with the language — might need it and find it to be very useful. It will give them familiarity with letters, numbers, shapes, and colours in an easy and fun fashion.  The middle demographic for this app is kids aged 3-10.

I tried it out on my  Nokia N97, and it is just as you would expect it to be. First, you get to the main screen, from which you can select exercises in letters, shapes, animal names, numbers, colours, and letter sequence searching. Letter searching, in this context, means alphabet sequencing, where a string of letters is given, and the player has to figure out what the missing letter in the alphabet sequence should be.

Each of these games is accessed by clicking on the game name on the app home screen, shown below.

I started with the Letters game.

Here, when I clicked on the speaker icon next to the letter A, I heard the app pronounce the letter. When I clicked on the speaker icon next to the word apple, I heard it pronounced. There is a different word associated with each letter, from Apple to Zebra.

Clicking on the home icon in the lower right, I then went back to choose the numbers game icon on the main screen, and pulled up the Numbers game.

The app asks “What number is this?” and you respond by typing in the letters that form the name of the number. In the example above, I had already typed in ‘o’ and ‘n’, and the app had voiced the correct letters as I typed them. I intentionally mistyped a letter and got a musical note indicating the failure.

Then, I went back to the home screen and selected the Shapes game, getting a screen like the one below:

I actually missed this one on my first try, thinking that ‘Sphere’ would be the correct shape because of the apparent 3D shading on the icon. I ruled out ’round’ because it had five and not six letters, as indicated by the hyphens on the screen, and then settled upon ‘circle’ as the correct answer. I had to remember that the simplest answer was probably going to be the correct answer on games such as this.

Then, back to the home screen and selecting the Colours game. It is played in a similar fashion, with musical notes indicating correct or incorrect letter entries. Incorrect letters do not show up on the screen to replace the hyphens. One simply tries again for the correct letter.

The animals game is played similarly, asking you what animal this is using the audio of the S60 5th edition device. Once you fill in all of the correct letters, it pronounces the name of the animal for you.

In the Letters Search game, you are given strings of letters that are in alphabetical sequence, except for one hyphen. The trick is to then specify which letter should be in the hyphen’s place.

I tried it out on a bright 3-year old, and she couldn’t get enough of it. When it was time to stop the play session, she was still asking for more. That’s a pretty high recommendation, I’d say.

The eLiteracy app is available for free in Ovi Store.