As mentioned in the brief description in Part II, the 'Fitaly keyboard' is a scientific design to minimize the total distance between the letters in most English words. Though it was designed for pen-tap input on PDAs, it's perfectly suited to be a spelling jumpboard, as the hopping player has much in common with a stylus when it comes to efficiency.
The term "Fitaly Jumpboard" comes from the Fitaly keyboard (so named because the second row spells 'fitaly') and the fact that it is different than the keyboard in that it is designed to be jumped on. It's fortuitous, yet coincidental, that the word 'jump' appears on the bottom row of the fitaly layout.
Go over the words with the spelling in your hands or within sight, until you feel you have the hang of the words. Then have someone quiz you. Hand the spelling list to a friend, parent, or teacher, and ask them to pick a word and read it to you. If you're playing by yourself, split the list up into groups of six words each and use the die to randomly choose a word, or write the words on scraps of paper and draw them from a hat.
When you have a new word, put your feet in the 'starting spots' and start spelling. When you jump to a new letter, say that letter out loud, to help your partner keep track of your spelling, and to reenforce the spelling in your own head. Tell your partner to stop you if you start spelling the word wrong. If you're playing by yourself, cover the word with your finger, uncovering one letter as a time for each jump, so you can make sure you did it right.
If you get a letter wrong, check the full spelling for the word, cover it up again, and start from the beginning of the word again. Don't go on to the next word until you've successfully jumped the word you're on.
When you can go through the whole list without getting any words misspelled, take a break, or move on to a different set of words. Don't go back to the current set of words for a little while. Later, quiz yourself on paper and see which words you remember how to spell. Keep track of the ones you can't spell, so you can 'jump' them again later.
When you try to spell the words on paper and you find it difficulty, close your eyes and picture 'jumping' the word. Remember where you need to jump to, and remember which letter is in that spot.
With enough practice, you'll easily remember the jumping pattern for a word just by looking at it, and will easily be able to pick up new words with just a few jump practices!
I made a mock board out of paper squares, and laid them out on carpet. For this test run, I wrote the letters that would be on the left side of the board in blue and the right-side letters in red ("Blue" -> "Left", "Red" -> "Right"). I laid them out in the Fitaly layout, with about an inch padding between each piece of paper.
The layout was bigger than I thought.
Starting out, I immediately realized that the board was bigger than I thought it would be, and was possibly bigger than it needed to be, as this board's size was defined by the 8.5x11 pieces of paper, and not by my feet, or the feet of the target player.
From the beginning I had a hard time because I'm not (yet?) familiar with the fitaly layout, and I had to keep reaching around to examine the board to find my next jump.
Immediately I realized that any notion of making someone jump to a specific spot with a specific foot, regardless of where they were before, was just ridiculous. Partly due to the fabrication of this board (paper on carpet) and partly from the distance needed to be jumped, I quickly realized that finesse, balance, and a choice of landing foot were all essential elements in this game.
Another area giving me trouble is orientation. I'm not sure how easily a student will remember the pattern if they change orientation at every jump, so their sense-memory of jump to jump is relative to the spot they're jumping from, and not relative to the board. I think this will still work though: They'll still remember where they're going, even if they're not remembering it in the same 2D fixed orientation of the board as looked at from behind the board.
A few findings:
Though actual gameplay is pretty much unchanged, I'm removing any restriction on which feet to use, or keeping facing a certain way. The second playtest is being conducted on a board of chalk on concrete. The playing board now has square tiles, and I'm making the right space into a hyphen and the left space into an apostrophe, to facilitate words with these special characters.
Game play was much improved. On concrete the game was much more playable, as both I and my companion playtester found that we could jump from one end of the board to the other without worrying about slipping or falling. We could even jump backwards when we knew where the destination square was.
The most surprising thing in this second playtest (where we traded off giving and jumping words) is how quickly we each started to grasp the fitaly jump layout. After only 10 minutes we remembered the placement of all the vowels and many common letters, and by the end of our playtest we only rarely had to hunt for a letter.
Though I consider the revised edition to be a success, it necessitates at least an index-card diagram of the fitaly layout, so that the player can create their own diagram. An excellent alternative would be to have the fitaly diagram painted on to the asphalt of the schoolyard, just as foursquare and hopscotch designs are commonly stenciled.
Though our mirth may have been in part due to the gratuitous theft of chalk from a Wean classroom at 2am, or finding a suitable non-snow-covered section of concrete amidst a snowshower, or just the glee of playing a new and somewhat silly game, we experienced joy in this second playtest. The game was fun, and even though when we left we were still only in the foothills of the learning curve, we looked forward to giving it another try as weather and sleep permitted.
My co-playtester commented that I was a dork, and I knew she meant it in the good way. High praise, indeed.