UCET 2019

A new web-app game can map any PK-5 student’s sight word lexicon while also growing the lexicon. The map is useful data for individualized reading assignments and interventions (Darrell Morris & Jan Perney, 2018. “Using a Sight Word Measure to Predict Reading Fluency Problems in Grades 1 to 3,” Reading & Writing Quarterly, 34:4, 338-348).
Using a simple mind-hack informed by a break-down of the cognitive workload of phonemic recoding, this simple game goes beyond flashcards and spaced repetition, accelerating the instantiation of lexigrams (visual-form words) in long-term memory. Simply put, this game effectively teaches new sight words and efficiently maps known sight words, delivering reports of student fluency in the Dolch and Fry sight word lists and insights into the visual word lexicon more generally. The efficiency of the lexicon mapping is driven by heuristically coded algorithms and machine learning.
This free technology is a labor of love by Russ Fugal, author of “Sara and the Pooka” — an award-wining children’s book on learning to read. This game is a stepping stone to a more powerful learning aide that overlays human intelligence and machine intelligence, creating an augmented path to early fluency. In this presentation Russ will briefly discuss the neuroscience of visual word recognition and sight word lexicons, how these inform this mind-hack, why he wrote it into “Sara and the Pooka,” and how information and automation technologies can leverage this hack.