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Great American Word Challenge Winner!

Posted by admin on 02.25.2008 at 8:26 am

I reported earlier about the Great American Word Challenge, a nationwide online contest that pit cities against one another to measure their greatness, not by the height of their skyscrapers, but by the depth of their vocabularies. Fresno received the highest cumulative average score and took the title and the prize: a Ubisoft donation of My Word Coach video games and Nintendo DS™ systems to a local family literacy center selected by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL). The beneficiary organization is the Fresno County Library Literacy Services Center, which provides free reading, writing, spelling, and math tutoring to Fresno County adults that cannot read or write English.

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“The city of Fresno is always proud to support family literacy,” said Deputy Mayor Jeff Eben. “We are excited to have won the ‘Great American Word Challenge’ and thank all Fresno’s residents who participated so successfully in this fun and creative Challenge.”

The Great American Word Challenge proved which American cities could walk the walk AND talk the talk:

— In addition to Fresno, the following cities rounded out the top four positions:

— Salisbury, Maryland (2nd place)

— Mankato, Minnesota (3rd place)

— Albuquerque, New Mexico (4th place)

— Oakland, California (5th place)

— Overall, the U.S. received a B- average grade on their vocabulary with a national average score of 167 out of 205 (81%)

— And here’s how long-time city rivals stacked up:

— Oakland is the smartest Bay Area city, beating out San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose!

— Despite preliminary results showing Brooklyn in the lead, at final count Manhattan is the highest-scoring New York City borough. The Bronx is the lowest-scoring borough. Here’s how the boroughs stacked up against each other:

1. Manhattan

2. Queens

3. Brooklyn

4. Staten Island

5. The Bronx

— Twin Cities? Not exactly. Minneapolis established itself as the more literate of the two, scoring 168 compared to St. Paul’s 140.

— Good (and smart) things come in small packages: Pasadena might be just an eighth the size of its sprawling neighbor, Los Angeles, but it’s 16% smarter! Pasadena scored 178 compared to Los Angeles, which scored a mere 154.

Article from Business Wire

Have your say » | Tagged Uncategorized, Great American Word Challenge, literacy, press

Rep Your City with the Great American Word Challenge

Posted by admin on 12.26.2007 at 11:37 am

Over at GeekSugar, the femme hip/intelligentsia mashup site, they have some interesting information about literacy. First of all they have the following:

The Education Department is blaming the country’s increasingly poor spelling and writing skills in youth on their love of text messaging. In a recent report on the national test results in English for about 37,000 students aged 15 and 16, the department’s Examination Commission said cutting-edge communications technology has “encouraged poor literacy and a blunt, choppy style at odds with academic rigor.”

Regardless of whether or not you’re buying into that as legitimate, GeekSugar links to The Great American Word Challenge. The game involves filling in the missing letter of the word, as defined. Why would you engage in such a thing? Well…

The city that achieves the highest-cumulative average score takes the title and the prize of a Ubisoft donation of My Word Coach video games and Nintendo DS systems to local NCFL learning centers. Even better, everyone who takes the challenge will be entered to win a trip for two to Washington, DC, and have the chance to win one of two Wiis.

Ah! The plot thickens! So support the NCFL as Nintendo battles illiteracy in the USA (seriously). If that doesn’t feel right for you, you could always go to FreeRice (as previously reported).