iAutism

Another app -the eleventh, to be exact- from Mobile Education Tools. This developer has accustomed us to a continuous release of educational applications designed to develop expressive, receptive and writing language. A year ago we analyzed Language Builder at iAutism, and now it’s time for Rainbow Sentences.

In short, Rainbow Sentences offers 168 exercises, highly configurable, to practice the construction of sentences of increasing difficulty that combine elements of who, what, where, why and to whom. A system of hints based on colors (hence the “rainbow” part of the name of the app) and three double difficulty levels let you tailor the use at various levels of students.

First, the settings
The first time you run Rainbow Sentences, the settings screen will appear. There you can determine a number of parameters that I will explain later. But almost the first thing you have to do is to create a user by entering their name and surname. Each user can record audio clips and generate stats of the exercises performed, and hence the need for a user management.

And then you can start with the exercises. You will see an image in the center of the screen showing a situation. Below, there are the elements that compose the sentence that describes this situation. In this first case, they are just two: subject and verb. Each has a different color. Above, there are two lines of the same two colors.

From here, the student must move each part of the sentence to its correct position. Each time you move a part, you hear it aloud (with a male voice). In this case, with only two parties and the hint of the colors, the exercise is relatively simple, but after you will be able to make it much more difficult. Once you have moved a part, you can still move it again to another location.

When you finish building the sentence, some more buttons appear: ‘Play’ allows you to hear the whole sentence; ‘Hide’ hides the buttons; ‘Play Lesson’ shows a screen that explains how to build sentences belonging to the current level; and ‘I’m Done’ will let you know if you built the sentence correctly.

By selecting ‘I’m Done’, if you have misplaced some parts of the sentence, Rainbow Sentences will notify you that there are parts in the wrong places and will move them back to the bottom of the screen. If you place them wrong a second time, you will see the lesson on how to build sentences.

If you have build everything right, you will be able to record an audio clip with your voice reading the sentences, play it as many times as you like, save it for later, or move to the next sentence.

There’s more. Below the main image, a message informs you about how many sentences you have to do to get a piece of a puzzle as a reward or reinforcement (generally every five sentences). The game has three levels of phrases, each with its puzzle. When you complete a puzzle, it shows an animation of it that lasts a few seconds.

The images are illustrations, not pictures, and in many cases show animals, as in cartoons. Thus, you will see a girl reading a book, but also a cat driving a car. That makes Rainbow Sentences more fun, but at the same time is something that some educators try to avoid for certain students.

All application screens are in portrait mode. Given the design that the Rainbow Sentences has, this orientation is the one that makes more sense.

More settings
Back to the settings screen of Rainbow Sentences, its first three options allow you to decide whether or not to hear audio instructions and messages informing you that the sentence is right, and to decide if you want option to record audio clips.

You can also choose the level of complexity of sentences. Each level includes 56 phrases. At level 1, they are relatively simple sentences with subject and verb. When you have built a good part of them, other sentences with an object (after the verb) appear. Level 2 adds the ‘where’ part of the sentence (and, again, the object after building several sentences.) And level 3 adds the ‘why’ part of the sentence. So we have three selectable difficulty levels and two sublevels of difficulty in each.

The three final options let you choose whether or not the lines and words are to be colored depending on which part of the sentence they belong to (subject, verb, where, why, to whom), and whether or not to each part of the sentence goes together or you have only separate words.

Thus, if we work with separate words but keep the help of colors and reach level 2, the exercises start to be more complicated. However, the colors are very helpful to place the words correctly. The subject is always blue, the verb is always red, the place is always green, and so on.

If you opt for separate words, no colors, and level 3, you will find sentences of more than 10 words that you will have to sort with no hint besides the length of the lines, as shown in the image. The hint of the length of the lines is the only one that can not be deactivated.

Extras
Rainbow Sentences includes some more features. Every time you build a sentence correctly, you are given the option to record an audio clip that you can also save. And the ‘Archive’ screen allows you to play those clips, delete them or send them by email. The image is sent as a PNG file, and the audio clip as a CAF file (a format promoted by Apple, more flexible than the well-known WAV, and that is playable on Windows computers also using QuickTime Player or other audio/video apps).

The ‘Stats’ screen allows you to see the usage statistics. There you can see how many correct sentences of each level have been built in the first, second and third -or later-try. You can also see the puzzles (and the animations, if the puzzles are completed), sent the statistics report by email and reset all counters.

Little more remains. Rainbow Sentences includes an instruction manual and allows you, from the settings screen, to access the Facebook page of the application and to view a tutorial video located in YouTube. The video is particularly suited to know everything that you can make with the app.

Assessment
As I said at the beginning, Mobile Education Tools is well known for its range of apps designed to develop oral and written language at the level of sentences. Rainbow Sentences is one of a collection, and has common elements with other apps, but has focused on the construction of sentences from their words.

With 168 sentences and images, three difficulty levels (and two types of sentences in each one) and a highly configurable hints system, the truth is that Rainbow Sentences gives for many hours of practice. It includes a basic system of reinforcements and statistical records, so it is a quite complete tool. As I mentioned, I would like to be able to deactivate the hint of the length of words, but in fact level 3 with no color aids is hard enough.

Who can use Rainbow Sentences? As with other apps of Mobile Education Tools, the user may well be a student with special needs but a fairly high level of language -expressive, receptive and written- as well a neurotypical student who wants a tool with which to practice building sentences. And in the case of Rainbow Sentences, a valid user can also be a non-native English speaker who want to practice building sentences, expand vocabulary and practice pronunciation.

-Francesc Sistach

This post is also available in: Spanish