App development in November went towards working on the Third Grade edition of Word Owl’s Word Search. During the first part of the month I finished gathering hundreds of words from various third grade sight word lists. After looking over the words I realized that in order to make this app more challenging for kids in and around this grade level I would need to make the board bigger. The previous Word Owl Word Search apps consisted of eight rows and nine columns which looked too constrained for third grade sight words. So I tried different letter block sizes and ended up making the board for this app consist of 10 rows and 11 columns. I wanted to make sure the letter block sizes were still very accessible so I didn’t want to make the board too big, but I definitely wanted to make it bigger than it was initially. Designing the bigger board involved a nice bit of math and geometry.

After finishing the updated board size I generated a lot of word search templates. When working on the logic for these puzzles I have to make sure the app knows which words may be overlapping. Without impelling code to make the game realize when this happens there would be several instances were the player is selecting but the app wouldn’t acknowledge that a correct word is selected because it shares a letter with another word in the puzzle. When this happens the app has to make sure to count that letter towards the total correct letters that make up each specific word. It sounds daunting, and it can be, but once I start working on it the process mostly flows smoothly.

So that’s a short overview of the app development that happened last month. I could go into more detail, but I’m incredibly tired. I’m planning on putting an iOS bundle together for all of my Word Owl sight word searches at a discounted rate before the holidays begin. However, I need to make sure I finish this app quickly because Apple will be going on their holiday break in a few weeks and I have to try squeezing in two review sessions…….I was reminded recently that app bundles have to be reviewed unfortunately. This happened when I was putting together a special discounted Black Friday/Cyber Monday iOS bundle on the Thursday before Black Friday, but after I hit submit it went into “waiting on review” status…..ugh. So yea I forgot that Apple reviews bundles in a manner that takes multiple days, and I waited too late to submit it. Oh well, enough of that disappointment, sleeeeeeeppp. Until next time ∞