Confounded

Confounded is a collection of games based on poetry which allows you to learn and experience poetry in two ways.

You can play and learn. Each line of the poem will appear word by word correctly in time, but scrambled in space. Touch the words in the correct order and they will disappear. Touch an incorrect word will turn it red, and you’ll be shown the whole line again, a little slower this time. Fail a line three times, and you’ll have to start over. When you think you’re ready, you can flip the expert switch to test yourself: here, all the words of a line will be displayed at once, and you’ll need to know the correct order without any hints.

You can also simply read. Here the poems are displayed as above in rhythm, but with no interaction needed to move to the next line. (I sometimes turn the speed way down and just let this run in the corner of a room, glancing over occasionally, amused at how the words have arranged themselves into new forms and meanings.)

Each way allows you to keep track of which verses you have completed (with separate tracking for the expert switch). Both also allow you to vary the speed of the display, make repeated lines not quite so slow, and change the lines to display word by word or syllable by syllable. You can even choose to unscramble the words, if you want the cleanest reading and learning experience.