Curious Learning
Curious Learning works with partners to curate & localize and distribute & measure free open source apps that empowers everyone to have the opportunity to learn to read. Then we make sure we measure what works and what doesn’t work.
- Website: https://www.curiouslearning.org/
- Digital Public Good: Reviewed by the Early Grade Reading Community of Practice in July 2020.
- Repository: https://github.com/curiouslearning/FeedTheMonster
Project 1: H5P version of Feed the Monster
Feed The Monster is a mobile game that uses proven “play to learn”” techniques to engage kids and help them learn to read. Children enjoy collecting and growing pet monsters while learning reading fundamentals.
The app is a current Digital Public Good but was built in a closed development environment, the game engine Unity. The existing app can currently be previewed here: US English version of Feed The Monster.
Expected Impact: Re-implementing Feed The Monster as an H5P (another Digital Public Good!) app moves an existing Digital Public Good to a more open technology standard. This will make it easier for the open source community to contribute and improve this project collaboratively in the open.
Project 2: H5P version of the Curious Reader authoring tool and rebuilding an existing Read With Akili story as and H5P capable app
The Curious Reader platform is an interactive storytelling platform which works through creating associations between written word, spoken audio, and graphical content and explorations of those connections. This type of content helps a pre-reader with oral language skills such as vocabulary, sentence structure, and background knowledge, as well as print exposure. It also helps consolidating readers with fluency and advanced oral language knowledge.
We currently have a tool named the “Rapid Content Creator” which is a Unity-based book editing tool that allows for the easy creation and localization of this Curious Reader interactive reading content.
Example Curious Reader content: Read With Akili - So Many Different Places, Read With Akili - What Do You Like To Do?, and Read With Akili - Akili and the River.
Expected Impact: We would like to make the Curious Reader authoring tool, the “Rapid Content Creator”, more accessible to a new technical audience first by migrating from Unity-based tool to an H5P-based tool. This work would be foundational to later expanding to a larger public, non-technical audience being able to author their own interactive stories.