⏰ Jack's Clock

Learning to tell the time on a real clock face — o'clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to

What this is

A clock with a face and two hands, the way it is taught in Year 1 and Year 2: first read it, then set it yourself. Forty clocks in six steps, always in this order:

	Step	What happens
1️⃣	Read o'clock	The clock shows 3 o'clock — pick the right one of three tiles
2️⃣	Set o'clock	"Make it 4 o'clock" — drag the hands, then tap ✓
3️⃣	Read half past	The short hand sits half way between two numbers
4️⃣	Set half past	"Make it half past 2"
5️⃣	Read the quarters	Quarter past and quarter to, with the face split into past and to
6️⃣	Set them all	O'clock, half past and the quarters mixed

🎮 How to play

1️⃣   Read the clock 👀

Three tiles, one right. The two wrong ones are the mistakes children really make: half past read one hour on (at half past three the short hand is already close to the four), past and to swapped, and the long hand read as the hour. A wrong tap wobbles the tile and greys it out — there is no way to lose. Tap any number on the face to hear it.

2️⃣   Set the clock ✋

The short red hand shows the hour, the long blue hand the minutes. Both can be dragged with a finger, and they are geared like a real clock: turn the long hand once round past the twelve and the short hand moves on by an hour. The long hand stops on the quarters, and when a hand is let go the clock says what it shows now — "quarter to four".

✓ Check gives a spoken hint about the hand that is wrong and makes that hand blink: "For half past, the long hand points to six." or "The short hand is just before four." After three tries the hands turn to the right time by themselves and it is on to the next.

⚽   Goal!

A right answer pays a football, shows the time in rainbow letters next to the digital time, and explains the picture: "Half past three! The long hand points to six. The short hand is half way between three and four. It is half past three." Five right in a row: On fire! 🔥

🏁   Full time

After the fortieth clock the whistle goes. Progress is kept on the device; ⚙ jumps straight to any of the six steps.

🎯 What it practises

• 🕐   Which hand is which — short for the hour, long for the minutes
• 🕧   Where the short hand really is — on the number only at o'clock, half way at half past, just after or just before at the quarters
• ↔️   Past and to — the right half of the clock is past, the left half is to
• 👂   The words — every one of the 48 quarter-hour times is spoken

🗣 The voice

Every line is a pre-rendered clip of Microsoft's neural en-GB-SoniaNeural voice — 206 of them: each question, hint and answer, and all 48 times from twelve o'clock to quarter to twelve. The browser's own speech synthesis is only the fallback for a line with no clip.

Everything the game can say is built in one block of index.html marked TEXT-CORE, and the phrase list the clips are rendered from is generated straight out of that block — so a new clock can never end up with no voice.

🎈 The other games

Game	What it is
🔟 Jack's Ten Frames	See numbers in fives, make ten, then add past ten on ten frames	▶ play
⏰ Jack's Clock	Read the clock and set the hands — o'clock, half past, quarter past, quarter to	▶ play 👈 this one
💯 Jack's Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play
🥅 Jack's Match	Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear	▶ play
✏️ Jack's Letters	Finger-trace all 26 lowercase letters in the correct stroke order	▶ play
🔢 Jack's Numbers	Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20	▶ play
📖 Jack's Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All ten on one start page: jackbenn.ing — newest first, homework on top, chess always last.

🛠 Built like this

Every game in this organisation is one self-contained index.html — no build step, no framework, no package manager, no analytics, and no network calls beyond its own voice clips (chess also loads its rules engine, chess.js, from jsDelivr, and Sight Words its font from Google Fonts). That is a deliberate constraint: a game a child depends on should still work in five years, and a parent should be able to read the whole thing in one sitting.

• Speech — pre-rendered clips of the neural en-GB-SoniaNeural voice, played through Web Audio, with the Web Speech API as the fallback. The AudioContext is created inside the ▶ tap, because iOS refuses to start audio any other way.
• Progress — kept in localStorage on the device (jackClockIndex, jackClockFootballs). Nothing is collected, sent or stored anywhere else.
• Made for an iPad mini in either orientation and a phone: the clock grows and shrinks to the space it has, so the tiles and the ✓ are never pushed out of reach and the page never scrolls. Finger-sized targets, no hover-only interactions, prefers-reduced-motion respected.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000

The start page at jackbenn.ing is built from google814/Jack, which is the source of truth. The repos in this organisation are copies kept in step by tools/sync-game-repos.sh in that repo, so each game also has its own page and its own link.