Cloudberry Tales

Personalised literacy learning for young students.

69% of children in the US read below grade level

— 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress, NAEP
A young boy reads with his finger tracking the words on the page and his head held low
Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

The Brief

Inspire young children (aged 5–11) to fall in love with learning. To improve reading and literacy levels in students and unlock every child’s potential through personalised and engaging learning experiences.

Challenges

We identified three core challenges to literacy learning:

  1. A lack of focus on language structure such as phonemic awareness, decoding, and grammar.
  2. Educators (teachers and parents) lack time and resources to meet individual needs.
  3. Content is rarely engaging or culturally relevant enough to be motivating or inspiring.

Literacy levels are far below where they need to be and we believe the key to solving this problem will be through personalisation (solving 3). New technologies will allow us to create fresh and engaging content tailored to the individual needs of every student. With that issue solved, we can then address items 1 and 2.

Solutions

Reading rope

Scarborough’s Reading Rope provides us with a detailed breakdown of the skills needed to develop a competent reader. The rope unravels the critical skills of word recognition and language comprehension. It directly informs our understanding of why some students succeed and some struggle and provides necessary direction for effective instruction. The rope is a tool upon which we can hang and measure all of our ideas.

Personalisation

Cloudberry has developed a large language model with a keen interest in stories. It has the ability to generate personalised content around an individual child’s interests, adjusting for their strengths and weaknesses.

The result is effective and engaging. Imagine reading a new story every night featuring your child’s favourite friends, family, pets and hobbies. Not only that, individual chapters can be shaped by your imagination as you reach key points in the story. Behind the scenes the stories can be injected with words your child finds difficult to spell, read or pronounce — gently expanding their vocabulary and skills.

The Reading Experience

A screenshot of the iPad reading experience. 1. Is the story presented for parent reading. 2. The same story re-written for a child with the option to write the next paragraph.

Every student has unique requirements so we have been designing a reading experience that can be personalised too. The UI provides controls for contrast, colour and typography options for font size and preferred font. We have explored using a set of fonts that aid with reading, you can choose from:

  • Kermit — Designed to get kids reading and help dyslexics.
  • Lexend — To reduce visual stress and improve reading performance.
  • Open Dyslexic — Optimised for dyslexic readers with heavy weight bottoms on each letter.
  • Bionic — aims to make reading faster by guiding the eyes through artificial fixation points.
Another example of the reading experience demonstrating the Open Dyslexic font on green paper

The same story can also be presented in different modes: Co-read, parent/teacher or student. This allows the same story to be generated towards different reading ages. Perhaps a teacher or parent will read a more complex version of the same story, whilst the child is given a much shorter and simpler variation with more images. Co-read allows these two versions to exist side by side.

Chaucer

Chaucer with arms in the air casting a wizard spell
Chaucer's hat rests on a book with his magic wand
Chaucer reads a Cloudberry Tale with a smile on his face

Students are guided through the app by Chaucer, a young apprentice wizard, learning alongside you. Chaucer is ever present and always on hand to help. Don’t understand a word or sentence? Chaucer will help! Want to know how something should sound, Chaucer will read it to you.

Games

We have developed a set of games for each strand of the reading rope. The games are used to test literacy progress and look for strengths and weaknesses. The results are used to refine future content and will also be made available to teachers and parents for review.

Pattern tapper improves literacy knowledge by teaching you to scan for shapes in a pattern similar to reading

The game below is focused on phonological awareness and decoding. By breaking down words into their individual sounds, we help students learn sound symbol correspondence.

A game to test decoding of words. Chaucer asks you to listen to a word and the pick corresponding sounds that make the word.

Next Steps

Cloudberry delivers research-backed learning tools, personalized for every student, accessible to every family. It’s everything you need to get early learners reading and writing. An initial prototype of the app is currently being developed and will be demonstrated at the May Center for Learning in the coming months.

Register your interest

Resources