Reading assistant app in use at school

Once again in the 2024/25 school year, our Digital Showroom: Assistance and Participation team is cooperating with the Niersenberg primary school in Kamp-Lintfort. Once a week, the Extended Reading Explorer Group, led by teacher Kristin Flücht, meets with Pedro Ribeiro, research assistant in our transformation project ‘Digital Showroom: Assistance and Participation’.

The group comprises 12 children from grades three and four with different reading skills. Due to the great interest shown by the pupils, the group will be reshuffled in the second half of the year to enable as many children as possible to take part.

As in the previous school year, the focus will be on working with the STREEN reading app developed by our teamDigital Showroom. In addition, Pedro would like to involve the children in the development process of a new reading assistant app. They will be able to contribute their experiences with STREEN.

How does STREEN work?

The name STREEN stands for ‘Story Reading Environmental Enrichments’. That sounds more complicated than it actually is.

Children can use various functions on their tablet in the STREEN app to refine and embellish a pre-stored story with pictures and effects, s uch as light effects. This brings the story to life and adds atmosphere. When the story is read out by the children in the so-called reader’s theatre, the images and effects can be displayed on a screen or smartboard to provide visual and aural accompaniment to the narrative, i.e. the words. Based on the selected effects and images, it is immediately clear whether the children have read and understood the story or the individual sentences correctly.

This school year, the children started with the fable ‘The Raven and the Fox’ by Aesop. The first sentence, ‘A raven sits on a tree’, can be accompanied by a picture of a tree and a raven on the tree, for example. The tree and raven are chosen by the children from a selection of pictures. There is a croaking raven, a raven with cheese in its beak, a sad raven, a proud raven and many more to choose from. Why? To check later when reading aloud whether the text has been understood. If the child chooses the picture of the raven with cheese in its beak, it will probably be pointed out by other children in the feedback round in the reading theatre that there was no mention of cheese in this sentence.

Children become researchers

The success of reading promotion programmes such as STREEN naturally also depends on how well the concept is received by the users, i.e. primarily the schoolchildren. While the Digital Showroom team is working on an optimised version of STREEN, which will incorporate feedback from schoolchildren and the experience gained from last school year’s Extended Reading Explorer AG, a new idea is already taking shape: Tangents. Here, too, technology is to be combined with reading promotion. The concept behind Tangents is to allow children to acquire reading comprehension and to make them write stories by playing with tangible, i.e. physical objects, like figues and other toys.

For Pedro, it is important to involve the children in the development of Tangents. He wants to turn his idea into reality together with them. To do so, he wants them to validate the team´s ideas and obtain a better understanding of the needs of both children and teachers. But there’s more to it than that. Pedro’s aim is for the children to understand the design process and also understand how important sharing their opinions is. At best they will consider themselves an important part of the design process. To this end, from the beginning of the school year to the start of the autumn holidays, the children worked in a playful way on the concept of a creative production process, i.e. design, and the skills required to ensure good cooperation between the various players.