Catch the Bubbles

Bubbles rise. Each one carries a letter or a digit. The screen asks for one, and your child taps the bubbles that have it. That is the whole game. No timer, no lives, nothing to lose.

The levels are built around lookalikes rather than around speed. Speed is the easy lever and the wrong one: a slow round full of characters a child cannot yet tell apart is still a reading test. So on easy, no bubble in the round can be confused with the one asked for. That is a rule and not a tendency, checked across 120 rounds per language and coming back at exactly zero. Medium lets lookalikes turn up when the draw produces them. Hard seeds them on purpose, and the round becomes the discrimination exercise itself.

Which characters appear is a decision too. The pool here is twenty-six capitals and nothing else, because A and a should not be the same question for somebody learning to read. Ten digits sit alongside them, and most children recognise numbers before letters, so a round asking for 3 is a gentler way in than one asking for W.

It is tap-only on purpose. A five-year-old on a phone cannot hold a sustained drag, and neither can anyone on assistive input, so nothing in it requires one.

This page is the English copy. On the site the same idea gets harder in the other languages: the Hebrew pool leaves the five final forms out, because a final form is the same letter in a different position rather than a different letter, and the Spanish pool puts N-with-a-tilde in its own alphabetical place between N and O.

No ads, no account, no download, nothing to type anywhere. It works on a phone, a tablet or a computer, it works offline once it has loaded, and it makes no network requests at all while you play.

This page is one game out of 43. The rest live at https://ellaz.fun in Hebrew, English, Spanish and French, with a room you decorate using coins the games pay out.

Your coins and your room live at ellaz.fun. This page is a copy of one game, so progress here may not be saved between visits. Everything is free in both places.

The source is MIT: https://github.com/Sigmafier/ellaz