Phunics

Inspiration

Literacy rates are decreasing. Many parents of today's preschool and primary school age children are set down with a tablet or in front of a television, using technology as a makeshift supervisor. Schools as well have been phasing out phonics-focused early reading education, and shifting more to the much less effective balanced language approach. Teachers among many age groups report that their students struggle with reading. All this combined, along with reflection on technological tools we used in our early education, lead us to design a hypothetical children's reading app.

What it does

Phunics' core loop focuses on repetition, which helps with grapheme-phoneme associations (learning the alphabet and digraphs) and practice speaking and reading words and sentences. Based on a child's age and reading level (available to and adjusted by their parent or teacher), the Phunics app provides practice from preschool to first grade level. That is all. It achieves the primary goal - no bells and whistles.

How we built it

An important part of our process was the design of the app. We created a proof of concept prototype in Figma based on preliminary concept art.

Challenges we ran into

Getting through and finding the right research took lots of time - sometimes papers didn't have the information we needed

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our caterpillar mascot, and the research for our slideshow (take a look at it!).

What we learned

We learned many facts about the history of reading education and information from other studies related to our goal. Our designer learned how to use Figma.

Built With

• figma