Contract Open

Game Changers 2.0: An Early Literacy Intervention with a Multi-level Linguistic Database, Automated Assessments, and Automatic Speech Recognition

NCER

Program: Small Business Innovation Research

Award amount: $250,000

Project director: Christopher Cerf

Awardee:

Sirius Thinking, Ltd.

Year: 2025

Award period: 8 months (09/12/2025 - 05/11/2026)

Project type:

Phase I Development

Contract number: 91990025C0077

Purpose

Even as American students’ reading scores continue to decline, the positive impact of media on learning has been consistently supported by research. However, significant barriers impede the use of interactive digital materials for teaching and assessing students: the lack of curriculum-aligned games that focus on sufficiently specific learning objectives, the difficulty teachers face in integrating games into their teaching, and the scarcity of technologies that enable easy tracking of student progress. In response, with support from IES SBIR awards, we have developed Game Changers, a Grade 1 phonics intervention that provides a comprehensive suite of granularly targeted games, videos, and songs, and makes them accessible to students at precisely the right moment for maximum educational impact. The new edition of our product will be enhanced to facilitate the delivery of literary education materials beyond phonics, with a particular focus on letter recognition, vocabulary development, comprehension, and knowledge building.

Project Activities

During this Phase IB project, we will develop a prototype of Game Changers 2.0, an expanded version of our original product featuring three new fully-integrated components: (1) an AI-enhanced relational linguistics database containing multiple levels of interconnected information about curriculum-relevant K-2 words, including their composite phonemes; their definitions, the grade level at which it’s appropriate to present them, and the familiar taxonomies to which they belong; (2) a back-end Teacher Portal with the power to assess the progress of individual students and automatically assign appropriate playlists; and (3) a range of AI-powered speech-to-text solutions that will facilitate the creation of appealing and effective games and assessments. At the end of Phase I, researchers will conduct a pilot study in four kindergarten and four Grade I classes to assess whether teachers will find the new tools for selecting playlists, which will include ASR-enhanced assessments, appropriate for each student and easy to use; whether phoneme and vocabulary mastery assessments completed using ASR will agree with teacher-based assessments 95% of the time; and whether students will find GC 2.0 easy to log into and engaging to use in school and at home, and that it increases their knowledge of the elements presented.