Organised by LiteracyPlanet, Word Mania is open to children in years 1 to 9 from across the world with a prize fund on offer of around £100,000.
In the competition, participants have three minutes to create as many words as they can from a board of 15 randomly generated letter tiles. By dragging and rearranging letter tiles into the word panel, players build, extend and rebuild words.
Word Mania aims to boost pupils’ word-building skills including their knowledge of phonemes, morphemes, affixes and plurals, as well as spelling and word recognition. Pupils can play on desktop or laptops.
Last year, pupils from 2,607 schools across 68 countries participated in creating 103 million words and played four million games. The highest score achieved in a single game was 43,496 points.
This year’s Word Mania warm-up round ends on April 23 and the final round, when the scores will count, takes place from May 2 to 5.
Schools participating in Word Mania will have complete access to LiteracyPlanet for free including its curriculum-aligned exercises.