The ABC Club.org

The ABC Club.org is an interactive, child-centric program that incorporates the diverse needs of students through the multiple intelligences that can be used anywhere in the world either by schools and/or students who cannot attend school either because of poverty, natural disaster or displacement due to conflict. Our platform allows for students to drive their own learning process through gamification of an adaptive learning program that allows students to work at their level and loop back for levels they need to repeat to create a strong reading foundation without gaps. Our interactive stories are also globally based, building early positive cognitive associations with cultural diversity to increase acceptance and tolerance.

Uneven access to high quality educational literacy resources is a global problem affecting both wealthy and impoverished countries. Due to natural disaster, conflict or poverty, some students are unable to attend school on a regular basis or at all. For students who are able to attend school do not always have enough time to master essential literacy skills before being pushed into a new level. As literacy skills build upon each other, students need to become proficient and to be taught at their own individual level and with large classes of students who have different learning styles, this need is not always being met. Frequent reason may include:

• uneven teacher training and/or bias
• inadequate time in curriculum, class or school structure for students to master skills in order to move to the next proficiency level
• lack of opportunities for students to actively engage and interact with their own learning process so they can take ownership 
• curriculum that does not engage a variety of learning styles so all students are supported in the way they learn best
• lessons that do not appeal to child's sense of wonder, curiosity and natural aptitude for learning in a fun, playful way

The United States has a literacy crisis. Approximately 32 million adults in the United States can’t read, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level. 

Reading on grade-level by the end of third grade is one of the most critical milestones in education. Studies show that 74% of 3rd graders who read poorly still struggle in ninth grade, and third grade reading scores can predict a student’s likelihood to graduate high school, unemployment, high crime, and high incidences of HIV, asthma, diabetes and other adverse health and economic outcomes.

For our pilot study, we will be working with 20 to 40 of schools in poor areas of New York City with on grade literacy rates as low as 10% on 3rd, 4th and 5th grade state tests. 

We will work with schools, teachers and students directly to implement the program to give students a solid foundation in 23 essential literacy skills and provide regular reading material through our interactive globally themed Choose Your Own Adventure stories.

The ABC Club program is a child-centric digital literacy intervention that works on developing 23 essential literacy skills through a series of games, songs and interactive choose your own adventure stories utilizing auditory and visual bombardment while teaching through the diverse learning styles described in Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences.  The Choose Your Adventure stories are globally based adventure tales that introduce children to a wide array of cultures and geographic regions to not only increase literacy skills but to also create positive orientations with diversity, acceptance and tolerance. Each game, song and book stresses a different language component from books devoted to singular phonic and phonemes to parts of speech and activities for decoding and sequencing. These are the skills that are essential to be able to reach a 3rd grade reading level. Students who are not proficient in these basic skills are unable to score well on their 3rd grade exams, which affects not only the rest of their academic lives but their potential economic, social and health outcomes. 

The Program features the following essential literacy skills:

• Phonic Awareness

• Phonemic Awareness

• Letter Recognition

• Word Recognition

• Word Pronunciation

• Sight Words

• Reading Fluency 

• Reading Rate

• Reading Accuracy

• Writing Letters

• Writing Words

• Writing Sentences

• Putting Sentences together

• Reading Sentences

• Contractions

• Short Vowels

• Long Vowels

• Initial Consonants

• Blends

• Digraphs

• Different parts of speech

• Word Families

• Root words

• Compound Words

• Word Prefixes

• Word Suffixes

• Concepts of Print

• Reading Daily

• Read Alouds students can follow

Program Features

• Interactive Child-Centric Literacy

Our patent-pending system offers interactive, child-centric curriculum that incorporates the diverse needs of students through the multiple intelligences that can be used anywhere in the world by schools and students who cannot attend school either because of poverty, natural disaster or displacement due to conflict.

• Learner Differentiation and Tracking

Our learning management system tracks and identifies areas that students need to work on directly. This can be reported to teachers or back to students so they can repeat lessons or follow pathways for more instruction in the problem area. It also allows for students who master certain literacy skills to move forward at their own pace, so if they are advanced- they can continue to advance to work at their optimum level.

• Online Digital Books 

More than 30 Interactive Choose Your Own Adventure Books that increase literacy and familiarity with global cultures that children can access at school or through a mobile platform for out of school work.

Utilizing a platform that is accessible through computers, tablets and mobile devices, The ABC Club.org is able to make a high quality literacy program available to students who have not traditionally had access to either school, a learning program that works targeting their level, or additional support for learning instruction due to economic, geographic or natural disaster constraints. Since our program works on a digital platform that is tailored to student need, we are able to provide it to those who have been formerly marginalized so they can have access to a strong reading and writing foundation.

Our teaching process and technology are novel because it allows for mobile, tablet, computer or VR capability and comprises the following elements:

Auditory/Listening Bombardment: this concept has been successfully used by speech pathologists but not been applied in a digital program through a multiple intelligence format that allows for active learning. Students who have a phonological impairments, are non-native English speakers or who have not had enough exposure to sounds and words struggle to pronounce letters, phonemes and words correctly. By using auditory bombardment, the child is bombarded with words that have the target sound to reinforce sound recognition, proper pronunciation while building a rich vocabulary.

Multiple Intelligence Approach: As Howard Gardner described in his Multiple Intelligence Theories, not all students learn best the same way. Each essential literacy skill is presented to incorporate a variety of learning styles coupled with visual and auditory bombardment so students have an opportunity to connect to the material using their own natural intelligence ranging from logical, linguistic, musical, visual, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, existential, naturalist, and more.

Speech Recognition and Accent Reduction: We are working on developing an AI solution that recognizes student speech patterns to assess and fine tune their verbal mastery of the language in addition to reading and writing abilities. This system will work to target pronunciation problems and reduce accents so students are able to learn English proficiency.

Learning Management System: adaptive targeting of student learning level for looping or advancement as necessary.

In a several year long study performed by NYU, lessons that were taught through a Multiple Intelligence approach had an 87% over the control groups. This is a more advanced adaptive variation of that program that also uses Auditory and Visual Bombardment as well as speech pattern recognition and an adaptive platform. We will run continuous Random Control Trials on our program and have received training from MIT JPAL's Evaluating Social Programs Professional Development Executive Education Course.

Currently during our pilot we will be serving 2,000 students. Within one year, after pilot testing, we can greatly scale the program. As it is digital, we can be working globally within 5 years. 

We plan during this year to run a pilot and do an Impact Evaluation of the program. We plan on building additional content and product offering over the course of the next year. Within 5 years, we plan on having a fully viable literacy program that works providing a strong literacy base and also works with additional community stake holders in a geo-specific context to incorporate local tales, folklore and stories.

We would ideally like to work with displaced refugee students in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey as well as local schools in the United States, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and South America.

Our biggest challenges to scaling are financial and finding high quality partners to work with to scale and adapt the programming on culturally and geo-specific basis.

We will raise capital by selling product and obtaining financing. Additionally we will work with other organizations that are seeking to solve the same problem.

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Our current staff is: 10, 1 full time, 2 part time, 6 consultants/contractors. We are planning to transition the staff to 6 to 10 full time members.

Our team has extensive experience creating both in-class and online educational programs. Several of our team were founding members of LEAP's Active Learning Leads to Literacy Program (ALLL).  ALLL was in a  longitudinal and quantitative study, conducted by independent NYU evaluators and showed that students receiving the ALLL program outperformed their peers on 87% of the 23 essential literacy skills tested. 

We have enlisted 20 schools in the New York City area to run a pilot program. We are working with Learning Instruction Leaders to target specific school needs. 

We are a Mission Driven Low Profit Liability Company working on a sliding scale fee basis with schools, nonprofits and other community stakeholders.

We can sell our products and programming at full rate and offset costs for a sliding scale basis fee system.

Working with Solve will allow for us to work with a wide array of community stake holders that are also looking to Solve the same challenge. 

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We would like to partner with schools, non-profits, NGO's and governments to tackle this problem. Specially we would like to partner with schools in impoverished areas where students have been under-performing in the United States, Egypt, China, Lebanon, and with refugee groups who have been effected by either conflict or natural disaster.

We would use the AI Innovations Prize to develop our Speech Pattern Recognition and Correction programming so students will have an immediate opportunity to learn correct grammar and pronunciation. Often when teachers have accents or were taught incorrectly themselves, they are unable to offer students proper instruction. This holds students back from being able to develop their language skills because they do not learn correctly initially and it can be economically damaging to them if they seek jobs that require English skills.

Our curriculum will provide young girls (and possibly women) the opportunity to learn using a mobile device so if they are living in a household, country or area that inhibits them from their own personal learning, it would be possible for them to do so without being subjected to social scrutiny or taking away from time for working that traditional educational classes may. Our stories in and of themselves show stories of strong young women who explore the world, take chances to learn and create positive cognitive associations with strong female characters and cultures.