SkillUP
Reading fluency practice
We participated in a 3-day hackathon with members from the Design and Editorial teams at Curriculum Associates, a K-8 education publishing company, to build a reading game for older striving learners in middle school to improve their reading fluency.
Our goal was to rapidly iterate and develop a playable reading game for students to practice encoding and decoding words through an adaptive learning progression.
Our contribution
Web game build
Game design
Technical strategy
The team
2 × engineers
1 × QA
3 × designers
2 × pedagogy specialists
Year
2022
SkillUP
Reading fluency practice
We participated in a 3-day hackathon with members from the Design and Editorial teams at Curriculum Associates, a K-8 education publishing company, to build a reading game for older striving learners in middle school to improve their reading fluency.
Our goal was to rapidly iterate and develop a playable reading game for students to practice encoding and decoding words through an adaptive learning progression.
Our contribution
Web game build
Game design
Technical strategy
The team
2 × engineers
1 × QA
3 × designers
2 × pedagogy specialists
Year
2022
SkillUP
Reading fluency practice
We participated in a 3-day hackathon with members from the Design and Editorial teams at Curriculum Associates, a K-8 education publishing company, to build a reading game for older striving learners in middle school to improve their reading fluency.
Our goal was to rapidly iterate and develop a playable reading game for students to practice encoding and decoding words through an adaptive learning progression.
Our contribution
Web game build
Game design
Technical strategy
The team
2 × engineers
1 × QA
3 × designers
2 × pedagogy specialists
Year
2022
Process
Embedding pedagogy
Our English Language Arts (ELA) editorial team members and designers created three in-game activities that would reinforce decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words. Decoding and encoding are reciprocal, closely related processes that help students link a word's spelling and sounds in their brain. Strongly-linked word representations make word reading automatic and unconscious, which leads to greater fluency and comprehension.
Adaptive level progression
We developed a level progression that would take players through the activity types in increasing difficulty:
Decoding: Uses voice recognition to confirm that the student can match the letters to the sounds that they represent and blend the sounds to pronounce the word.
Multiple Choice: Plays an audio prompt and asks the student to choose the correctly spelled word that matches. Distractor words have been carefully chosen to represent common errors that readers might make.
Encoding: Asks the student to spell a word from an audio prompt.
If a student is not successful with a word, we have the student 'fall back' to the previous activity type and try that simpler task with the same word. If the student makes an error on Multiple Choice, they will be presented the same target word with fewer answer choices.
Crafting the experience
As the game was targeted for middle schoolers to practice and maintain reading fluency, our designers created an age-appropriate character and background art in a sophisticated style that suited the narrative of the game.
Technical nitty gritty
The WebGL game was built in Unity/C# using the UnityWebGLSpeech open source plugin (enables speech detection in Unity via the Web Speech API).
Process
Embedding pedagogy
Our English Language Arts (ELA) editorial team members and designers created three in-game activities that would reinforce decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words. Decoding and encoding are reciprocal, closely related processes that help students link a word's spelling and sounds in their brain. Strongly-linked word representations make word reading automatic and unconscious, which leads to greater fluency and comprehension.
Adaptive level progression
We developed a level progression that would take players through the activity types in increasing difficulty:
Decoding: Uses voice recognition to confirm that the student can match the letters to the sounds that they represent and blend the sounds to pronounce the word.
Multiple Choice: Plays an audio prompt and asks the student to choose the correctly spelled word that matches. Distractor words have been carefully chosen to represent common errors that readers might make.
Encoding: Asks the student to spell a word from an audio prompt.
If a student is not successful with a word, we have the student 'fall back' to the previous activity type and try that simpler task with the same word. If the student makes an error on Multiple Choice, they will be presented the same target word with fewer answer choices.
Crafting the experience
As the game was targeted for middle schoolers to practice and maintain reading fluency, our designers created an age-appropriate character and background art in a sophisticated style that suited the narrative of the game.
Technical nitty gritty
The WebGL game was built in Unity/C# using the UnityWebGLSpeech open source plugin (enables speech detection in Unity via the Web Speech API).
Process
Embedding pedagogy
Our English Language Arts (ELA) editorial team members and designers created three in-game activities that would reinforce decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words. Decoding and encoding are reciprocal, closely related processes that help students link a word's spelling and sounds in their brain. Strongly-linked word representations make word reading automatic and unconscious, which leads to greater fluency and comprehension.
Adaptive level progression
We developed a level progression that would take players through the activity types in increasing difficulty:
Decoding: Uses voice recognition to confirm that the student can match the letters to the sounds that they represent and blend the sounds to pronounce the word.
Multiple Choice: Plays an audio prompt and asks the student to choose the correctly spelled word that matches. Distractor words have been carefully chosen to represent common errors that readers might make.
Encoding: Asks the student to spell a word from an audio prompt.
If a student is not successful with a word, we have the student 'fall back' to the previous activity type and try that simpler task with the same word. If the student makes an error on Multiple Choice, they will be presented the same target word with fewer answer choices.
Crafting the experience
As the game was targeted for middle schoolers to practice and maintain reading fluency, our designers created an age-appropriate character and background art in a sophisticated style that suited the narrative of the game.
Technical nitty gritty
The WebGL game was built in Unity/C# using the UnityWebGLSpeech open source plugin (enables speech detection in Unity via the Web Speech API).
Outcome
On the final day of the hackathon, we presented our concept and process of building the project, before conducting a live demo of the game in the form of a skit. As several team members acted as teacher, middle school student, and fictional character cheerleading the student on, we demonstrated a student's typical progression in the game.
With its straightforward interaction types and strong visual narrative, the game as demonstrated in the skit was a compelling learning activity that would encourage students to practice and have fun reading.
SkillUP won the Best in Show Award at that year's Curriculum Associates Hackathon Award Ceremony.
Outcome
On the final day of the hackathon, we presented our concept and process of building the project, before conducting a live demo of the game in the form of a skit. As several team members acted as teacher, middle school student, and fictional character cheerleading the student on, we demonstrated a student's typical progression in the game.
With its straightforward interaction types and strong visual narrative, the game as demonstrated in the skit was a compelling learning activity that would encourage students to practice and have fun reading.
SkillUP won the Best in Show Award at that year's Curriculum Associates Hackathon Award Ceremony.
Outcome
On the final day of the hackathon, we presented our concept and process of building the project, before conducting a live demo of the game in the form of a skit. As several team members acted as teacher, middle school student, and fictional character cheerleading the student on, we demonstrated a student's typical progression in the game.
With its straightforward interaction types and strong visual narrative, the game as demonstrated in the skit was a compelling learning activity that would encourage students to practice and have fun reading.
SkillUP won the Best in Show Award at that year's Curriculum Associates Hackathon Award Ceremony.