Free Spelling Games

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Jason Shah

I’ve created five spelling games for Spelling Test Buddy. They are hugely popular on the platform, with some games being played many thousands of times per day.

But given how easy it is to rapidly create games these days, in the back of my mind I’ve always been a little bit worried about someone taking this idea of spelling games, building it themselves, and releasing it for free.

So, last week I took a minute to browse around and discovered:

A few key domains were actually available
Keyword search showed some real promise of generating traffic to those exact match domains
Ad-supported models for this are actually still pretty effective (over the medium term)

With this, I present to you FreeSpellingGames.com, where students can improve their spelling with games, for free.

FreeSpellingGames.com will contain most if not all of the spelling games found in Spelling Test Buddy. It will be ad-supported.

It is meant to let casual users and students try and play the games. For more advanced features of saved word lists, classroom management, reporting, tests and practice, however, use Spelling Test Buddy.

Enjoy!

Spelling Test Buddy in the wild

Posted on January 15, 2026 by Jason Shah

This is cool.

A journalist from the Township Journal (a local newspaper serving several counties in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) reached out because they were doing a feature on a local school Spelling Bee. They wanted to put the sample words into their web version.

We worked with them to get an embedded version of Spelling Test Buddy hosted on their article. Now, readers of the interactive version of the article, Test your skills this spelling bee season, can take a version of the same spelling test that students took, and compare how they did.

Try out the spelling test to see how you compare!

Is TV good for Indian Women?

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Jason Shah

This article from the Economistophile’s Marginal Revolution (emphasis my own). To important to summarize, so I will copy the whole thing.

Cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the developing world. The availability of cable and satellite television exposes viewers to new information about the outside world, which may affect individual attitudes and behaviors. This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural India. Using a three-year individual-level panel dataset, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women’s status. We find significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference. We also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing). The effects are large, equivalent… to about five years of education in the cross section, and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing differential trends. These results have important policy implications, as India and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women.

PowerPoint and the MBA, a required combination

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Jason Shah

Hot off the wire, Chicago GSB became the first school to require a PowerPoint component to their application. The interesting part? There are only three general guidelines:

Four slides
No video
No hyperlinks
No flash

Other than that, go nuts.

Reminds me of Stanford’s up-to-7 page application essay #1 (“What matters to you most, and why?”), or NYU Stern’s Personal Expression essay (“Please describe yourself to your MBA classmates. You may use any method to convey your message”). This seems to be a good middle ground – fun and open, yet not so unstructured that you would need to struggle with logistics and choice of medium.

My guess is that the school is going to let in more consultants and fewer engineers with this requirement. The idea is interesting and I think it will be fun to watch. Perhaps more interesting will be the MBA applicant community’s response to this.