Google is well known for their various projects with many initiatives and labs focused on bringing new ideas to the world. Google’s Area 120 has just released their latest project, Rivet, an app focused to helping kids practice reading to enhance their literacy skills early in life, that sounds worthwhile.
There’s many barriers to helping kids learning to read, there’s physical access to books, having time to sit and read and of course the desire to read. Rivet trys to address these issues with a free library of 2000 books at launch and an app designed to make reading enjoyable.
Of course anyone can create a kid’s library app, but this is Google. The app has multiple assistive technologies including:
Follow along: where the book can be read to you children with each word being highlighted as the story progresses, for parents who only want their kids doing the reading this can be turned off.
Real time feedback:for select titles the app will listen to the Child reading the book and highlight each word as it’s correctly read. If the child is having a problem with a specific word they can tap on that word and practice getting feedback on which sounds in the word they’re getting right and wrong.
For those concerned with privacy all processing is done on device with no data going back to the cloud.
And what modern app would be compete without some game-ifacation. Rivet uses a mix of points, badges and mini games to keep kids interested in reading and using the app.
It’s easy to be suspicious of apps like this but for many kids this may be the first step in achieving better literacy and that’s something worth striving for.
Rivet is available now on the Google Play Store and the App Store for English language books for readers in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
