New version of Letter Prince: a game to teach children to read better

Improved version

After Steenbeek had finished her thesis on reading errors among primary school pupils in 2012, she was approached by the parents of a boy in the third year. He was supposed to practice reading at home but, because the exercises were so unappealing, he actually started to dislike reading. There must be another way, the parents thought. They went to Steenbeek for scientific input and initiated the development of a new reading app. A few months later, the Letter Prince app was born.

The renewed version uses an algorithm to adjust the exercises to the child’s results: if a child reads more quickly and makes fewer mistakes, he or she will get more difficult exercises or the words will change more rapidly. The funny ‘surprise sentences’ help children to remember the material better. An example of these, said Steenbeek, is the sentence ‘I put socks on my bread’. “And then your brain thinks: huh?! Children often laugh at those sorts of sentences.”

Another new element in the game is the Memory Palace developed by Boris Konrad, a memory researcher at Radboud University. The Memory Palace focuses special attention on letters that are often interchanged, like the b and the d. By putting words with these letters in an illustration – for example, a dwarf in a salad bowl – children can visualise them and then remember the word better.

Practice based on what goes well

With Letter Prince children first practice based on what they can do; then mistakes can be corrected. “As a result, they read faster and more precisely,” the researcher explained. “That’s a remarkable result. Existing methods often train via the mistakes made, but then reading speed increases less quickly.”

Research shows that children who learn to read well profit from this throughout their lives, Steenbeek added. “They hardly ever completely compensate for a low reading speed. At secondary school and later in their professional lives, these pupils often have difficulty.” In addition, it appears that people who read more also score higher on social and cognitive skills. Steenbeek: “So it’s important that we teach children that reading is fun. Letter Prince also gives them personal book tips.”

DNA profiles

The psycholinguist hopes that future researchers will be able to learn more from the data collected by the game. “We want to ask parents if they would be willing to provide their child’s DNA so that we can try to see if we can explain certain reading differences among children by using their DNA profile. We know that dyslexia is often genetically determined. Then you could let those children start learning to read by using a different approach. Eventually, we want every child to learn to read as easily and enjoyably as possible.”  

Crowdfunding

For the development, user-friendliness and innovation of Letter Prince, Esther Steenbeek has started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Radboud Fund. The money will enable the game’s makers to continue to offer it for free.