Each week, my sons aged 9 (3rd grade) and 7 (2nd grade) receive a set of words to remember and every Friday they get a spelling test. Neither of them are big fans of spelling tests. My eldest son, Ben hates being told that he is wrong. So, when revising and I tell him he didn’t spell a word correctly he can get quite upset. That’s not much fun.

Through a chance encounter between me playing with the text-to-speech API and my son, I created a very rough tool called RobotSpelling to help him. It is, admittedly still very rough around the edges, but hey, it works “OK” for now. I've shared it with my sons' principle and their teachers and I think the class used it for a little bit which was awesome.

I'm working on a completely re-written next version in React, which I'm learning along the way. My background is in C/C++ and embedded / backend networking software, so React is, right now - extremely frustrating. To be honest, I'm getting a little disheartened. But thought I'd share what I have.

Background and some more of the "Ahh Haa!" is on a blog post I wrote last year: https://withbighair.com/the-1st-version-of-robot-spelling/