A one-page account of what this pack is actually teaching, which parts of the Western Australian Curriculum it sits against, and — just as importantly — what it does not claim to do.
Year 7 Literacy & Numeracy Foundations. Roughly 27 enrolled, one hour a week, no set programme, no allocated resources. Students are working at a foundational level and several arrive with a well-practised refusal to engage with written work.
The binding constraint here is not curriculum coverage. It is participation. An hour a week of worksheets that go uncompleted teaches nothing at all; that has been tested and observed in this room. Every design decision in this pack follows from that: it is all spoken, with nothing to hand in, because that is the format this cohort will actually take part in.
Western Australia's curriculum, administered by the School Curriculum and Standards Authority, is based on the Australian Curriculum and organised into strands. The mapping below is by strand and sub-strand, in plain language.
| Game | Primarily develops | Strand |
|---|---|---|
| Bomb Party | Recognising letter patterns inside words, not just at the start — the skill that underpins decoding longer words | English — Language: phonic and word knowledge |
| Create A Word | Word building and spelling patterns under constraint; the class sees each word spelled out letter by letter | English — Language: phonic and word knowledge |
| Emoji Decode | Compound words and morphology; inference from limited cues | English — Language: expressing and developing ideas |
| Off Limits | Definition, synonym and circumlocution — describing a word precisely without using it | English — Language / Literacy: interacting with others |
| Imposter | Precise word choice under pressure; listening closely to others; inference | English — Literacy: interacting with others |
| Odd One Out | Categorising, and justifying a position with a reason — many rounds have several defensible answers on purpose | English — Literacy; Critical and Creative Thinking |
| Who’s Lying | Sustained oral recall against a clock; estimating what you can actually deliver | English — Literacy: interacting with others; Numeracy |
| Say the Colour | Reading automaticity and holding a rule against interference | English — Literacy: reading fluency |
| Blind Clock | Mental computation across all four operations, plus estimating elapsed time | Mathematics — Number; Measurement |
| Create A Person | Oral fluency, general knowledge, turn-taking and group judgement | English — Literacy: interacting with others; Personal and Social Capability |
| Glitch | Checking whether an answer is plausible before accepting it — verification rather than calculation; estimation at the easier setting, recall of number facts at the harder one | Mathematics — Number: additive and multiplicative thinking; Proficiency: reasoning |
| Pinpoint | Number-line sense, inequality and successive halving; at the widest range it becomes place value — why 500 is a better first guess than 999 | Mathematics — Number: place value; Proficiency: reasoning and strategy |
| Exactly 100 | Judging the magnitude of an operation before performing it; complements to 100, doubling and halving, and mental addition called out by the room | Mathematics — Number: additive thinking, mental computation strategies |
Across the pack, the general capabilities in play are Literacy, Numeracy, Critical and Creative Thinking and Personal and Social Capability.
Structured classroom talk — where students have to explain, justify and listen to each other — is one of the better-evidenced levers on comprehension and vocabulary. Every game here forces speaking with an audience that is listening, which is the part a worksheet cannot do.
Pulling something out of memory strengthens it more than being shown it again. Nearly every round in this pack is retrieval: produce a word that fits this pattern, name six of these, decide which one doesn’t belong. The dopamine wrapper is a delivery mechanism for a very ordinary and well-supported study technique.
Vocabulary breadth is among the strongest correlates of reading comprehension, and morphological awareness — understanding how words are built from parts — supports both decoding and spelling. That is precisely what Bomb Party, Create A Word and Emoji Decode drill, without ever announcing itself as spelling practice.
For this cohort, time-on-task is the whole ballgame. A lesson students take part in for fifty minutes beats a rigorous one they sit out. That is not a lowering of standards; it is sequencing.
Points earned in these games go onto the classroom board alongside behaviour points, and a negative balance converts to detention minutes. This is deliberate: it ties the thing students want (playing) directly to the thing the room needs (working respectfully), rather than running two disconnected systems. The games hold no scores of their own — every scoreboard, roster and record lives with the teacher, and any class record on screen resets between classes so no group is chasing another’s number.