SEPANG: Just three months ago, the nine-year-old was still learning how to build words, still figuring out where confidence came from, and still unsure whether he belonged in a room full of competitors.
He was one of only 10 pupils in a small class, finding his footing and learning the basics.
Within four months, he was walking into a national Scrabble tournament and finishing in the top 15.
“That made him feel so much more confident,” Keeran Bathmanaban, who worked closely with the boy, told FMT Lifestyle. “He completed the first junior level, moved up, and now he’s doing extremely well at the senior level.”
The change did not show up only on the scoreboard: “His parents kept texting us that because of his interest in Scrabble, he has grown so confident and energetic, and his love for sport has grown a lot.”
Keeran is the founder of Wordsmiths Academy, a Scrabble-based learning programme that trains schoolchildren aged seven to 17 across eight schools in the Klang Valley.
What began as a free online class during the pandemic has grown into a structured academy, complete with a custom syllabus and five coaches.
Touted to be Malaysia’s first Scrabble coaching academy, Wordsmiths runs weekly classes for those in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, alongside an online programme for students elswhere. Fees range from RM90 to RM120 a month for four 90-minute sessions.
To think it all started at home for Keeran, when his mother started a Scrabble club at the school where she was teaching, and Keeran began playing the game with his brothers.
“When I was seven, she got me into the club and, a year later, I was competing in tournaments,” he recalled.
Keeran, who has a double degree in business analytics and digital media and communication, remembers getting “batted terribly” in his earlier competitions. But something about the game stuck.
“Those new and weird words made me go, ‘Hey, what is this word? How am I supposed to use it?’” he said.
By secondary school, Scrabble had become a serious pursuit. Keeran competed in national tournaments and represented Malaysia. Then reality set in.
“After SPM, I was like, ‘OK, fine, let’s forget about Scrabble. There is actually no future in that.’”
Then Covid arrived. Stuck at home, playing Scrabble casually with his brother, Keeran began thinking about the hundreds of children he had seen at tournaments over the years – enthusiastic, but lost.
That gap bothered him. So did the realisation that Scrabble had taught him far more than vocabulary: strategy, adaptability, arithmetic, even multiplication.
“One of the biggest skills Scrabble teaches is luck,” he highlighted. “You never know what tiles you’re going to pull. It might be a huge game starter, or it might be a slow start. You just have to make the best out of it.”
That philosophy became the foundation of Wordsmiths Academy. He started small, inviting juniors from his old school into free online classes.
Then demand grew, and a syllabus followed. “We are the first academy in the world to create a Scrabble syllabus book,” Keeran revealed. “Before this, kids just memorised printed sheets and went to tournaments. There was no proper guidance.”
Wordsmiths’s syllabus breaks learning down into stages, starting with two-letter words and building up to strategy, sentence-making and confidence.
Classes are part lesson, part quiz, part play. “We don’t want it to be rigid,” he added. “We want them to experience the journey.”
While many attend the classes with joy, Keeran acknowledged there are those who joined reluctantly “because their parents forced them”.
“But, one month later, they’re the most enthusiastic kids in the class. They’ll come earlier than us and wait!” he said with a laugh.
For him, moments like these matter more than scores or trophies. His goal is to make cognitive learning accessible and enjoyable, especially within schools.
“We want to focus on the child’s development more than achievement,” Keeran stressed. It is a philosophy rooted in a childhood spent at a Scrabble board – discovering that sometimes, the most meaningful lessons come not from winning but from simply wanting to play.
Find out about Wordsmiths Academy here and follow them on Instagram.
