Simplifying Alphabet Reasoning with Letter Sequence Buddy 🤖

Introducing Letter Sequence Buddy

As my Char continues preparing for her 11-plus exam, one of the areas she’s focusing on is Verbal Reasoning, which includes tricky letter sequencing questions. These questions ask her to identify patterns in a sequence of letters, like figuring out what comes next in a series such as A, C, E (the answer is G, by the way 😉).

Although I don’t find these questions particularly hard, I noticed that Char takes a lot of time to solve them. Part of the challenge is that she often has to write down the entire alphabet and draw arcs to figure out the patterns. But as she works through several exercises, the repeated writing and drawing becomes messy, and the overlapping arcs can make it hard to see what’s going on. This can even lead to mistakes, even when she’s reasoning correctly.

That’s when we decided to build an app to help simplify this process. We call it Letter Sequence Buddy, and it’s designed to save time and make the analysis of letter sequences clearer.

Letter Sequence Buddy

Letter Sequence Buddy is very straightforward. It displays a sequence of alphabet letters in order, right in the middle of the screen. You can scroll through the letters left or right, and to highlight a pattern, you just tap on a letter and then tap on the next letter. The app automatically draws an arc between the two letters and shows the distance between them, simulating how my daughter would manually draw arcs. 

For more complex patterns, we’ve added a dual-color feature. You can switch between red and blue arcs, with red drawing arcs above the letter sequence and blue drawing them below. This makes it easier to separate overlapping patterns, like one sequence going forward and another going backward, so it’s clear which patterns belong together.

While it would have been easy to include an option that automatically provides the answers, I made a deliberate choice not to do that. I want this app to be a tool that saves time by helping children quickly visualize letter patterns, but I still want them to work out the reasoning on their own. It’s important that the app doesn’t take away the challenge but instead enhances the process of solving the problem.

We’ve just submitted Letter Sequence Buddy to the App Store, and I’m happy to see that Char is already using it and making good progress in her Verbal Reasoning exercises. If you or someone you know struggles with analysing letter sequences, this app could be a great tool to help save time while working through the reasoning process.