Game Changers: An Early Literacy Intervention with a Multi-level Linguistic Database, Automated Assessments, and Automatic Speech Recognition

Sirius Thinking, in collaboration with the Success for All Foundation, proposes to create and pilot a significantly expanded and enhanced version of our soon-to-be-released Game Changers literacy intervention. Game Changers is a comprehensive library of concise, engaging, research-based web games, each designed to reinforce a specific early phonemic awareness or phonics objective. These games are combined in YouTube-like playlists with highly entertaining digital assets from Between the Lions, PBS’s award-winning literacy series, that support the same educational goals and are delivered over the internet to early literacy students, both in the classroom and at home, at precisely the right moment to reinforce their learning. In this project, we propose to add three new components to the existing intervention. These are: 1) a unique relational database housing linguistic information about K-2 target vocabulary, 2) a Teacher Portal that offers automated student assessment tools and easy assignment of individualized playlists, and 3) state-of-the art ASR technology to enrich games and assessments with children’s spoken responses. These components will facilitate efficiently targeted delivery of robust and effective new content focused on literacy curriculum areas beyond the existing phonemic awareness and phonics resources, specifically, vocabulary development, comprehension, fluency, and knowledge-building.