Thanks so much for your response Vanderson! I wish I had known about How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons when I was teaching my daughter. I definitely fumbled my way through it :).
> I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)
I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper.
> What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?
Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::.
Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).
Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).
Congratulations on launching! I love the combination of an app coupled with physical books. It really demonstrates your understanding of your customers.
* I would love to know more about your phonics instruction. From what I can see, Ello embeds the instruction into the "help the child sound out the words" component. Is that correct or is more systematic instruction provided?
* How do you help children overcome the seemingly maddening inconsistency of the English language? For example, the long a sound can correspond to the a, ai, eigh, aigh, ay, er (RP), et, ei, au, a_e, ea, and ey graphemes.
* Does your speech recognition system understand at the phoneme level?
BTW, I would love to connect. I am an independent educational researcher and early literacy edtech founder. My background is big tech (principal engineer at a FAANG company) and am now navigating the treacherous waters of building an audience, securing funding, bringing in experts, etc.
Is there a whitepaper that documents how PrepScholar "automatically learns the strengths and weaknesses of each student and creates an individualized learning program through machine learning"? For example, ALEKS [0] is based on the Knowledge Space Theory [1].
> I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)
I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper.
> What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?
Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::.
Thanks again for sharing your DI story.