New 2013 Scripture Mastery Games

In 2013, new online Scripture Mastery games were announced by the Church. I was involved in this project, and so I’d like to take a minute to tell you about the new features of these wonderful online activities.

• New Scripture Verses. The new activities contain the new scripture mastery verses. About 30% of the verses have been changed from what they used to be over the past several years. The new verses reflect prophetic direction regarding what the brethren feel are scriptures that teach the doctrines and principles that youth today need most to understand and apply in their lives.
• Mobile Friendly. When we began the project to build the new online Scripture Mastery activities, we were given the requirement to make it so people could play the games on iPhones and iTouches, Android phones, Kindles, laptops, desktops, and just about any other device you can think of. The most economical way to make the games playable on so many devices was to make it a responsive (i.e. mobile friendly) website. (Responsive means it responds to the size of the screen of each device.)
• Tracking Progress. The new activities have each user log in with their LDS Account, and then progress through the activities is tracked. Each activity has an easy, medium, hard, and mastery level of difficulty. Users can work their way through the activities and slowly increase their level of difficulty and have their progressed tracked. When they leave the activities, they can come back another time and pick up where they left off. And they will know when they have mastered the learning activities.
• Languages. These new activities are available in ten languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. Making activities that worked in ten languages was not an easy challenge. For example, the much loved game with hints of the first letter of each word would not work in far eastern languages. We had to develop games that worked in both roman languages and those with more complex characters.
• Purposes of Scripture Mastery. Perhaps most importantly, these new activities focus on the four purposes of Scripture Mastery.  The new Scripture Mastery activities website has three activities, one for Locate, Apply, and Memorize. A fourth activity for Understand is scheduled to come out next year. These activities will help youth not only memorize the scripture verses, but help them locate the scripture references, understand the doctrines and context of the scriptures, and apply the scriptures to their daily lives.

There are many more benefits of the new online Scripture Mastery games, but I can’t mention them all here. Go play them, though, and you will see for yourself. Enjoy!