Learn Spanish by MindSnacks

Although this review focuses on its Spanish app, Mindsnacks has created a bevy of foreign language apps to help users learn Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Chinese, and Japanese. Mindsnacks structures its apps so users first engage a brief lesson about a topic of the language they are studying, and then users play games to reinforce and practice the language skills taught in the lesson. After playing a game, users are provided with statistics about their performance. Mindsnacks apps also monitor users’ progress as they gain language proficiency in Image Recognition, Spelling, Rapid Recall, and Error Recognition. As users make progress by completing lessons and earning satisfactory scores when playing the games, new lessons and game levels are unlocked.

Instructional Ideas

1. After learning about a specific language topic, students can reinforce their learning by playing a game in which its content aligns to the language topic that was taught.
2. Teachers can assign students to develop their knowledge of foreign language independently by completing the different lessons and games in this app. Teachers can monitor student progress by reviewing their statistics. One idea for progress monitoring is to have students take a screen capture of their statistics every Friday and email it to their teacher.
3. After becoming familiar with the games in this app, teachers can have students design a paper-and-pencil version of a game that advances a language topic being taught. For example, if students are completing a game that reinforces their knowledge of Spanish numbers in the app, students could create a paper-and-pencil version of that game that teaches Spanish colors instead.

Screenshots