Last week I wrote about building Phonics Journey. A lot of people asked to see what it actually looks like.
Here it is.
A few things worth pointing out that aren't obvious from watching:
The planet map covers all 100 levels. Every locked planet stays locked until the child achieves 100% on the level before it — no skipping ahead. The winding path mirrors the Little Wandle progression from Phase 2 through Phase 5.
The letter tiles are drag-and-drop. Tap a tile to auto-place it, drag it to a specific slot, or tap a filled slot to return it. The distractor letters in the tray increase as the phases progress — Phase 2 has two wrong letters in the mix, Phase 5 has four.
"Tap to hear · Hold to peek" — tapping plays the word via TTS. Long-pressing shows a large emoji representation of the word as a hint. sat shows 🪑, frog shows 🐸. Fully offline, nothing added to the bundle, falls back to ✨ rather than crashing if a word isn't mapped.
The Star Bank in the top bar tracks lifetime mastery. Every star earned across every level accumulates. Hit enough stars and the Rocket icon changes colour and rank — Cadet → Explorer → Captain → Master. It gives the child something to work towards beyond the current level.
The parental gate is a maths challenge. Tap the cog, solve the arithmetic problem, and you're in. From there you can edit the profile or record your own voice for any phoneme — replacing the TTS for that sound throughout the app. Useful if the system voice is mangling a tricky sound, or you just want the child to hear a familiar voice.
Coming to Android and iOS. Repo at fynes-forge/phonics-journey.