Learning to Read With Drew Badger
The following is a transcript of Homeschool Together Podcast Episode #34 "Learning to Read with Drew Badger".
A PDF of the transcript is available here: Download Now!
Below this point is the full transcript
Homeschool Together
Hi, Drew, thanks so much for joining us today on the show.
Drew Badger
It's my pleasure, it's great to meet both of you.
Homeschool Together
I appreciate it. Um, would you like to give us a little background, maybe a little introduction to who you are and what you've been doing, and maybe this wonderful app that you've created?
Drew Badger
Well, just to give a bit of background about my history for teaching, I came to Japan in 2003, to teach English and to study Japanese gardening. And I really enjoyed teaching, but I found it was, it was good for helping people pass tests, but not become confident speakers. So in addition to watching other people, and how they were learning and seeing how they were continuing to struggle to speak, and also seeing how I had experienced similar problems when I was learning different languages. And even as I just came to Japan, and was struggling with that, I decided to rethink the way people could learn. And it actually happened when I was, I was actually feeling quite depressed, thinking, Well, you know, I should be smart enough to person to figure out a language, especially if I'm living in a foreign country. And I struggled actually a lot with Japanese. And it was quite embarrassing. You're living in someplace and not able to communicate with people. But I happen to be walking through a park one day, and wondering why I was struggling, I started to just look at the little kids and how they were learning differently than how I was learning. And so once I just realized they were basically doing the exact opposite of everything I was doing. So instead of learning with a textbook, they would actually just look at physical examples and see very simple things, the way their parents were explaining them, or explaining to them things. I just adopted those same methods. And then as I became fluent in Japanese, I started applying that to my own teaching. And then I began teaching on YouTube. And that was about 10 years ago, and I started a company doing that and helping people learn online. And the holy grail for me has always been, how can I make a system that anybody anywhere in the world can use because, and this is maybe quite different from the way most teachers think, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a second language. So it's more about how you learn. And most people if either of you to try to learn a second language, you know, it's typically taught where you're studying textbooks, or you're, you know, trying to just memorize things or listen to vocabulary, word dialogues, that aren't actually the way people really communicate. If you learn that way, you don't become a very good speaker. In fact, those learning methods actually stop you from communicating. So I wanted to take the lessons I learned and apply them in an actual system. And in the future, I plan to make more apps and more software, because I felt that's the best way to learn is certainly for learning beginners. But what I wanted to do is, again, make that system and so Frederick, the app was the first one I created it, not only my adult students could use, but also anybody, especially native speaking, American kids, or kids from any anywhere around the world could use to start teaching themselves English. So it's more like a video game than what would typically be done where you'd have a teacher try to tell you what something is. And we can get more into the details of it. But that's basically how it happened. So for a long time, I had the idea for the app about 10 years ago, but this was long before, you know, software, or even just smartphone use was widely available, and certainly not in the countries where I happen to teach so we can get into more details. As you're asked questions about.
Homeschool Together
I've had a you know, I think Ariel's tried French. I've tried German, and Spanish. Did you try Spanish? No, no, just French French? You know, I think it was just an absolute abysmal failure. You know, we watched a your short video around Fredrik the app just a couple times now. And actually, it was really illuminating on how you explained not just the English language, but just you know how to learn the language or how to learn a language. You go into a little bit about, you know, what is Frederick? What is the methodology? You talked a lot about a methodology where you kind of blend phonics and sight words and sort of your thinking around that. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that? Sure.
Drew Badger
So in general, the idea that I came up with or what happened with Frederick, and I think I explained this a bit more when I wrote you kind of a little bit of a synopsis of the reasons why I decided to do it. But there are a number of different factors that came together, as these are the things I need to solve in order to create a solution that I want. And part of that was thinking about, before we talk about learning a specific thing, we should step back and think about how learning actually happens and how it works well. And so thinking about that, and I've just studied education for a long time and having been a teacher in the classroom and also just teaching people online, you know, thousands of people For over 15 years now, you see a lot about what works and what doesn't. And you notice it very quickly. It's almost an intuitive kind of thing when you look at young children and how they learn. And, you know, having children yourselves, you know, is over here as well. Like, if you tell a child to do something, their first impulse is to say, No, even if that thing could potentially be good for them. And that part of psychology that I studied a long time ago, and I continue to just be fascinated by human psychology today. But it's the idea that people are much more kind of willing, and able, or, like, just the ideas that we develop ourselves, or the realizations, or the experiences we have are much more believable to us. And they become much more memorable, rather than what we hear from other people. And there are a number of reasons for this. But you can see why, you know, humans might next necessarily be a little bit nervous about what other people say, you know, you have to trust other people and believe what they're saying about certain things, or there's an animal over there or something like that. And so there are lots of different reasons why you might want to think about kind of believing your ideas more than somebody else's. But if you apply that same idea to language learning, we're really any learning in general, the more you can discover by yourself, the more you develop agency and ownership. And those two ideas are really important for how you actually learn something. So the way the brain actually learns, we can talk a little bit about that as well. But that basic idea of you needing to discover an idea, rather than someone telling you what it is, because if you've ever tried to just have a key to remember something by using flashcards or traditional rote repetition, you see their eyes glaze over the information goes in one ear and out the other. And it's really difficult for them to follow that up with, you know, you try to tell them something a day later. And they're like, well, I don't even remember covered. And so this happens, not just for language learning, but for math, or science or anything else where you're trying to teach something. And if the difference, even if I tell my child, hey, don't touch that stove, it's hot. Now, they might listen to me. And they might believe me, because they trust me, but they won't really know it's hot. What that really means until they try to touch it themselves. And then they learn that lesson very quickly from that. And so when we have a situation where people need to learn something, if they can discover that lesson by themselves, they feel a lot more excited about it. No Did I tell you just a quick story about this and make the point specifically for language learning. But as I live in Japan, I was in a different city called Fukuoka. So I live in Nagasaki now. But in Fukuoka, I was visiting a friend of mine and we were going to go to a Korean barbecue restaurant. And I think he was a little bit late, but I was at the restaurant first. And at the table. I saw a poster for the Will Smith movie After Earth. You guys remember that came out a few years ago?
Yeah. The one with him and his son.
Drew Badger
Yeah, yeah. So he is saying that actually, the point about him and his son being in the movie is important to the story. But I looked at it in the poster was all in Korean, but it was a regular movie poster the same way you would see a movie poster in English. And so I thought to myself, I wonder if I can figure any of this out. So I don't speak any Korean. I know anything really at all about Korean I know it's similar to Japanese, but the written characters are different and pronunciation, things like that. But looking at the poster, I said, Okay, what do I know about this? I'm using my own context, my own experience that I already understand about movie posters. And one of those things is that usually, the names of the actors are at the top of the movie poster. And so I know that Will Smith and his son are both going to be on there. So if Will Smith and Jaden Smith, you've got the name Smith on there, you're probably going to have the same characters on there two times somewhere. I don't know whose name is first I'm guessing you know, we'll because he's more famous, but but sure enough, when I looked at the poster, I could see okay, there's the same written characters, which don't really mean anything to me, but I could see it was the same thing for both names. So it's, you know, if we just looked at it like Square Triangle square, and then the second one was also Square Triangle square. And so I looked at and I thought, okay, I've heard that Korean is similar to Japanese and that you've got these phonetic sounds like car key crew, that kind of thing. And so if Korean is similar to Japanese, then you probably have a name like su lease, and that's how you pronounce it in Japanese. So it turned out actually I checked later that okay, that actually was the correct way to read that and so you could look at the characters and even the characters. If it was Square Triangle square, the two squares are the same. So we know that has to be Probably the same sentence. So we get something like sue me. And when I looked at that, also, the name of the name of the movie is After Earth. And so they don't have that TH sound either. And that same character was down in that. So after it would be like us, that kind of thing. So looking at that, I said, Well, I just talked myself some Korean. And you know, of course, I did check online to see if I was correct. But when I found out I was I said, You know what, that kind of learning. That's amazing. And that's what learning really is when you That moment when you actually discover something, rather than somebody having told you what it was. And so in a mood in a video that I made, actually explain to parents how this works. It's kind of like, if you're watching a movie, if you're watching some movie, you're really into it, it could be some thriller, or something like that. But there's some kind of puzzle or to who done it, you have to figure out who the killer is. If I come in before the end of the movie, and I tell you who the killer was, you're going to be angry, because you wanted the chance to discover that for yourself. Because that that feeling of discovering something, especially as most movies are written that the audience is supposed to discover who the killer was usually before that killer is actually review. And that's to make the audience feel more excited about watching it. So if I can make you feel, wow, like, I figured it out before the characters in the movie that you feel smart, you feel excited, and it's memorable. And so if you take that same idea, and this is just across, you know, any group of people, as human psychology works for all of us, you make it available for people not to just be told something, but to actually discover how it works. So applying the same idea to Frederick, you're taking, instead of letting people like look at individual letters of words, by themselves, you're letting them compare them. And then you get to see not just the difference of like, you know, C a t, or C, A, B, but you can switch all the letters around to have like, bad bed bead BOD. But, and when you look at that it's equally profound, I guess you could say in more just like the experience of seeing what it is, rather than learning a bunch of flashcards individually. So you're getting to compare different things, which is my which is how the mind naturally learns. So going a little bit more into the study of the way people learn. Like we understand dark, when comparing it with light, or black and white, or you know, anything like that we're looking at the opposite. And that's how we, we create a foundation of learning that we build upon with more difficult or complex subjects. But the things that we discover by themselves or by ourselves, I should say. That's what creates that that memorable foundation. And that's why little kids are learning like that all the time. They're actually not learning very efficiently. Because most parents when we're teaching kids, we don't actually have a systematic way of teaching kids. So you actually could teach your own children not only to read faster, but just to learn your native language, whatever that native language is, because most kids and I was explaining this in a recent video as well. Talking about my daughter, no well, so she's one and a half now. And she had gone recently, she was going walking to the shower, to get in the shower with somebody. And she was it was like not ready yet. So she had to walk back. And then she said like in Japanese, Yom Denae, which is like, call me, you know, when you're ready, or whatever, that kind of thing. And if you look at that, you think, Wow, she actually used the correct grammar for the correct situation. But the truth of the matter is that she's actually just hearing other people use a particular set of sounds in a particular situation. And so the way natives learn a language is they're connecting the meaning of something with just sounds. And it's only later that they understand, okay, I can take this and then I try to apply that in other situations. So that's why you see little kids like English speaking kids, they will see something like I go to the park. So they're taking a rule, they understand how it works. And then as they get older, they're not just copying what people do in situations, they're beginning to apply that in other ways. And, and that's how you see little kids, you know, they learn the the mistakes, or the things that you should be saying instead, and then the parents correct that. But that's how you learn. And so I was thinking, How can I take something and apply that to language learning and enable not only my adults to have something but you know, my own children or other people around the world who want to learn, because there really shouldn't be English for Japanese speakers or English for Spanish speakers or something like that, because that's only going to teach you in a kind of logical way here, what the rules are, and here's what you need to remember for a test, but it's not going to help you acquire the language and make it your own. And so when I talked about For an agency and ownership that's at the command of the language that comes with knowing how to say something without needing to think and translate in your head before you speak.
Homeschool Together
So the big hurdle that through the you're talking a lot about the discovery, this kind of intrinsic, you know, matching, I found myself doing a lot of that type of in line correction of my older daughter, you know, when she's using the wrong past tense of this verb, or this, or this or that, I do find myself correcting her. And then, you know, a month or so later, she's using it properly, like, like what you said, this kind of like connection oriented learning? How do you overcome the, you know, they're seeing things you are talking to them? You know, it's an auditory experience at first, when kids are learning to speak? How do you meld that with the visual aspect of actually seeing the thing in place? That's a huge hurdle for those younger kids. I know what matters for us because we're, you know, we're trying to teach our younger kids to read, it's kind of easier once somebody already understands that these these shapes or these structures, like you said, with the poster, they mean something. So you already know that and so you're trying to Intuit what it means. How do we get the kids over the hurdle of understanding that these weird shapes that that we're looking at? Are those sounds? That's that's been a big hurdle for me for my younger daughter's almost five now is trying to get her to associate those sounds with those with those that character?
Drew Badger
Yeah, I think that's a great question. Um, part of the part of the thinking like when I'm teaching my own kids, or even anybody else back when I used to teach this manually. So this whole system that Frederick is, it was just a thing that I did, actually with flashcards in the classroom. Actually, again, I mentioned before about having the idea before smartphones were really as ubiquitous as they are, I wanted to make this out of wood. So you would have wood blocks, and they would kind of spin in the same ways you could have something at home, but this just gives you a way for kids to figure that out for themselves.
Homeschool Together
But you may you may want to reach out to Melissa and Doug.
Toy toy manufacturer they probably love you
think they have like Montessori, a lot of
what's been done feels very Montessori Yeah,
Drew Badger
well, yeah, I mean, that again, the the Montessori idea is you getting to discover a lot of
things for yourself. Exactly. Yeah,
Drew Badger
I went to Montessori School for a little bit when I was younger. And I really enjoyed that we were actually felt it was almost not structured enough. So I ended up going back to regular public school. That's a whole other conversation you can get into. But about this specifically, making kids understand. And this is kind of a tricky thing about English because we have a letter name and also a letter sound. And so when I first start teaching them, you know, when however old they are, I always begin with the name of the letter. And people argue with me about this. But the reason I do it is because the name of the letters don't change. So it gives kids some kind of anchor. And often the name of the letter is connected to the pronunciation. But there's no real logical difference to a child between looking at a butterfly and saying, okay, that's a butterfly and looking at a letter, that's just a symbol and calling that a certain name. And so once you can get them to understand that, then you kind of like not necessarily need to explain to them so much that Okay, these have different sounds. But you can see how it's presented in Frederick that the first level begins with just the names of the letters. And then every level after that has the names of the letter sounds or the different sounds they have based on the combination. And so what I do for that you can see in like level two and level three, you're learning that the rules change, depending on how the combination works. So if you first teach them the names of the letters, and that's just to give you a language literally to to communicate about, okay, this is the letter A with a letter Hi. But now we're going to take these and put them together. And if we put them in this combination, they produce the sound. And if we put them in this combination, they produce that sound. And really, it's just the repetition but letting them explore that and then seeing if they can figure this out. And then it's kind of like, it's kind of like a puzzle really for for getting kids to understand how how the letter names transition to the letter sounds. And then you can ask them questions like if we do A, B, and that sound is app, and then we also have a tea and that becomes at what happens when we get a an MP once they so we've kind of built it up the same way we build up an understanding of mathematics. And that's how you kind of over time do that but I would spend a lot more time just with the review and having them apply that that understanding or that practice in different situations. So what I'll do is I'll have my daughter use the app or I'll write it down on a whiteboard or you know, just say Oh hey, like this On some sign on the street, you know, here's the particular letter combination. So it's through the review that they come to understand that it becomes more of a natural. It's almost it's kind of the opposite really, of how adults learn. So we need to have as adults, like, why does that work? What's the grammar behind? Why don't we Why don't we do it in this way, but kids are much more accepting of just this is how it is. And so if you say something, they wouldn't ask you. Why do we call it this word? And not that word? It's not until they get older that they begin saying, Okay, well, this other language says it like this, or why does this grammar rule not apply in this situation? when they're young? Just like that example I gave earlier about my younger daughter? No, well, saying you'll know. She doesn't have any reference for what that means, or which part of that is even a word or not a word? Or is it all one word or something like that even you listening right now, assuming you don't know Japanese, that maybe that sounds like one word to you. Or maybe that's a couple of different things, you have no idea. But once you understand this connection of sounds, works with this meaning where I can get someone to do something or this verb being something, it's more about just getting them to make that connection and then reviewing it again, and again.
Homeschool Together
From what you're saying you had him associated the name of the letters. I know a lot of the phonetics programs Don't even start with the names of letters, they just go right into the sounds. Yeah, they just bought it just completely bypass that I know, was a top what teacher kid to read in 100 lessons. The curriculum program that we're currently using, which is all about reading, just jumps right into the phonetics, but they do do a lot of the same type of things with that association, where they'll take, you know, three letter word cat, and then they'll be swapping out one letter, and they'll use kind of manipulatives on like a on like a grease board with magnets. And we'll be swapping them out. So you would actually have somebody who's listening maybe as a young reader, or a young learner to actually start with the names of the words and then move into the into the phonetics
Drew Badger
yet. So I would start with a wet start with the names of the letters. And the reason you do that is because you need to have an anchor in some way, where this is always what something means. And that's more for the psychology of Okay, what we're going to do after that is, now we're going to show you how the rules are broken. But if you give them some kind of rule first that says, Okay, today we're talking about this letter. Or if you want to explain the spelling of something, you would do it using the letters, you wouldn't do it using sounds because multiple letters can make the same sound. So when you're teaching a child, you begin with the alphabet for that reason. Now other people would say, What's maybe not useful to do it that way. But I haven't I haven't seen a compelling argument why you will not want to do it that way. And it's again, it's more for is more for the like the psychology like I mentioned before, I give you another like quick just example that this is not related to learning to read at all. But let's say you have two credit cards that you need to pay off. The first credit card has, like $100 in debt on it, and it's got, you know, 20% interest rate, and the second credit card has $10,000 on it. And you know, same interest rate, which one would you want to pay off first? A smaller loan? Why?
Homeschool Together
Because you can knock it off faster, and then roll that payment into the larger one.
Drew Badger
Yeah. So even even just looking at the credit card, from your mind's perspective, it's just two credit cards. And they're actually viewed equally from that. So if you can cut that first one off, and like Wow, now I only have to pay off one. And that momentum is much more psychologically exciting to you, then what would seem kind of logical about we're going to try to pay off the other one first. So that's why sometimes you might think like, Well, most of the, like the reading is done not using letters, it would seem like it's a good idea to use, just go straight into phonics. But again, when you're trying to talk about how do you spell this or trying to communicate, this is the letter we're talking about right now, especially when you're not actually showing a letter, it's much easier to have that anchor first that breeds a lot more you know, the the security or the certainty that a child needs to have something starting out. So it's kind of like teaching math in the same way you teach the names, you know, what the numbers are, what they refer to, and then you can start playing around with
Homeschool Together
that makes a lot of sense. We started our daughter off with a another program in her pre k called logic of English and it started off with videos fairly colorful, playful, but the videos basically said, you know, the three sounds of a and it was all about and I could just see her, like being overwhelmed by it and chose to go with something different. Yes, like,
it's hard for me to think about all the sounds.
is the first letter
Homeschool Together
Yeah, like if you're like tell me all the sounds of a I don't, I couldn't
write it was funny. When we were watching the video. I was like, oh, there are three sounds like we Even ourselves, we're looking at it and is the first letter of our daughter's name as well. So I think she was just like, but mine is an O sound right? And she just, you know, it was it was very overwhelming for her sight, I can see how this approach would be really helpful to folks. So. So we've talked a little bit about getting getting started with the methodology, can you go into more detail about how the app works, the level structure, and we've had some time to play with it, but just for our listeners,
Drew Badger
sure. So going after the alphabet, again, that's the reason we have the first level. And I want to make it clear to people that I haven't really done anything revolutionary, other than enable kids to do the same thing that most kids have been using to learn to read. You know, since people were learning to read, the only thing I've done is make it so that kids could actually do it themselves. And that's that ends like really the important innovation about the app. But it's teaching phonics, but it's just going through them in the same steps that you would take normally. So you start with the alphabet, you start with short vowels. So that's like an a, an A, and then you have consonants and then you start putting those together. And then you start doing blends. And the whole app has 35 levels that covers all 44 sounds of English, although not every spelling, because I would get a little ridiculous. But it goes through all of the levels in a very simple step by step format, which and I think it took me almost like a year just to sort through what words should be taught and in what order they should be taught in. Because looking online, if you go and just have let me find a phonics list, something like that, you're going to struggle to find anything where number one is a consistent order that phonics should be taught in other than maybe the alphabet, if people again, like some people even disagree with that. But often, people will make the mistake of teaching multiple phonetic elements at the same time, even just really because something is a more commonly used word. So an example would be the word brand. Now we have looking at a word like bread, we have the blend BR and then we have the vowel digraph. Or you know what, and I don't even like trying to teach parents what particular sounds mean, because it's you know, it's not really important for actually helping kids. It's another reason I didn't want to make a video series teaching people how to do it, where it's like, today, we're gonna look at consonant digraphs. And then adults that their eyes are glazing over as well, because they don't, they don't care. People want kids who can read. And so let's get straight to the point here.
But if you look at that you're confusing a child by teaching them too many things at the same time. And so if you think about it, like a staircase, if you have evenly spaced steps that enable you to take one at a time, you could really move up those stairs as fast as possible just very quickly. But if you start introducing gaps into those, or you make some step, needlessly higher than the others, then you're going to find actual parts where it becomes really frustrating. And part of that is because of people teaching those multiple phonetic elements at the same time. And so what I've done is actually meticulously gone through with over 2000 words, and just made them. So there's a really simple way for you to look at each individual sound in isolation, while comparing it to other things that are relating to that. So an example like I gave before about a cup, and like a bat and bit and bought that kind of thing. So you're comparing the different short vowels, and seeing how they relate to one another, which also provides more practice, but you're not teaching too many things at the same time. And so if I'm trying to teach something to a child, and explain this, actually, in a recent YouTube video where I'm talking about triangulation, and I was explaining even just a simple idea, you can teach to your own kids about this to understand the idea. The reason humans have two eyes, or two years instead of just one is because we need to isolate where a sound is coming from. And that's nearly impossible to do accurately with only one year, you can get a general idea of something. But as soon as you have two eyes, you can say, okay, I've really got that, like if you just you know people listening right now, if you look at the things in your room, and you cover up one eye, you can see generally Okay, I know it's over there, but you can't tell the depth until you have that second eye available to you. And so when we're learning things, we have as many different points of reference to compare something. That's why repetition becomes important, but also just very simple comparisons, where we only change one variable. So it's kind of like a science experiment. If I have a T A, B is tab, and then I give you ta P, and that becomes tab, then you hear Okay, like I only change one thing and the sound changed in this way. And that way again, without any parent trying to tell you what something is you discover that yourself and it becomes much more memorable. Hence, you can learn much more, just make it much more easy to learn, it becomes a whole lot faster to do that. So using that idea I just went through. And again, a lot of the time for developing the app was actually just figuring out what order to teach things, because I couldn't find any list online, or with a school that had already developed that system. But there's nothing different about the app other than we take the phonics teach it in steps. And then we also give commonly used sight words, I think they're like 200, like all the dolch sight words are used. And for people listening, just a very quick introduction to teaching reading, basically, you get about 84 84% of the language can be decoded. And this means you can break down the sounds of the language, or the sounds of a word into something understandable. So you'd have like a word like cat Regan act, so you can decode that. But a word like VA, if we were to decode it phonetically, it would sound more like that. So that is something that you have to learn and you see the word often enough that it just becomes something very easy that a kid would recognize, but again, part of that is is applying those same kinds of words and some even word I think the word though, isn't talking to level four or five when we're actually Introducing digraphs. And so a digraph. And again, I don't even want to give too too much of the names of things but so a digraph is where you start taking two or more letters and putting them together but they create a new sound, as opposed to a blank. So a blend would be something like FL and the word flag so we're not changing the sound of frl we're just blending them together as a full sound, but th are combining that to make a new sound.
Homeschool Together
So when you're talking about this discovery method, I can even draw something into my own life. When I went to college, my first year I, one of my science classes, my physics class, actually did a discovery method of learning as opposed to, you know, having some teacher at a board writing down equations, doing example problems, we actually learned for the entire year through experimentation, where they would give us the tools, they would give us some simple steps. And then we had to go off and actually do the experiments, take the data, and then kind of reverse engineer the physics by actually doing and doing the actions. And I found that to be kind of a really different way of approaching the same problems. And I did notice a lot of students actually grasp the concepts a lot more, because they did have that experiential learning that discovery method to pull that into what you know, with Frederick, we've been doing a kind of a box curriculum, you know, books, notecards, things of that nature around the reading curriculum. And we had some initial struggles with say, blending sounds together. And that was kind of a big hiccup, we did a podcast about that, you know, a couple episodes ago, about some of the challenges we had, we kind of came through that. And one of the things I was using was actually your app, alongside with the curriculum is kind of like an extra piece of equipment that I could use to help teacher and get her through those, those hurdles. You know, my daughter's a very auditory learner. And so one of the things that I found about your app that was really helpful is that she's being told the sounds, and then she's using those sounds and associating them to the word as opposed to trying to, you know, remember and recall from her own brain, you know, what that sound is for that letter? Are there any other type of problems that you see that parents have, when they teach reading that word, they can use this app to kind of overcome those problems? I know you're, you're big on the Discovery method and kind of this intrinsic motivation of just letting the kid find find the thing? Are there other problems that we do as parents, or maybe young homeschoolers, that are common issues that maybe can be alleviated by this by using the app?
Drew Badger
Yeah, I think you actually, you said it perfectly. The app is a tool. And you combine that with kind of what like what the actual learning system should be. And it's the same thing that I'm developing now for language learners, there's the time spent learning something where you discover things by yourself, and you understand the rules, but the fluency is developed through practice. And so that's where you actually spend more time as the parent instead of having to teach them something. So imagine, if you only have, you know, an hour or something like that, if you have to spend half of that time, using flashcards to teach, you know, the sound or the rule or something like that, that's 30 minutes that you've lost for actual reading practice, or playing some kind of game where you get to review what they use. So Frederick is valuable as as a way of teaching. But in addition to that, I highly recommend and this is what I do with my own daughter, I mean, we just we work through, like leveled readers, I think like a to z reading is a great resource for people, but really anything that allows you to have applying what you're learning in a different context, because it's, it's that the number one proves they can do it. So you don't want kids to just review the same thing again, and again, because they're learning through memory rather than actually understanding rules. And so if you would take something like Frederick and then write it down on a piece of paper, it's the same exact words, but the the new context proves that they can actually read it or not. So you give that, hey, there's that street sign that has this, you know, phonetic element or whatever that thing is. And so you're going to ask them to try to read that thing, or even to try to write it. And so you apply these different, you know, modalities, if you could call them that. But it's just different ways of like that triangulation idea that I explained earlier, where you're giving them multiple ways to review something. And that's what makes it more concrete for them and says, oh, there's an actual application for this thing. I'm not just learning these weird sounds for no reason. And then all of that builds on itself, but it's more about using a tool instead of the parent. And this is the crazy thing about teaching people to read that it's it's really made to be such a complicated thing that parents first have to try to understand how teaching reading works, because many of them have kind of forgotten how to do it, or what sounds make what and I mean, unless you've got an interest or some kind of training, it's almost impossible for you to remember. I mean, most people if I said, hey, what letter comes after each and people might some people might not know what that is. And it's just because we're often don't remember things like that. But if you're trying to teach your child you use a system where they can actually learn themselves and then they begin applying it something else. So it's similar to having your child play a video game by themselves and then you play that video game with them or use those same skills in some other context.
Homeschool Together
How important is a mentor to the teaching, you're talking to, you know really eloquently about the idea of a, of a student kind of discovering things, through the, you know, through struggling. And through the struggle, they find the meaning and what they're what they're learning. And they, that creates some deep ingrained respect for what they've learned, how important is the mentor, and maybe what you've seen in your life, and also through maybe your YouTube channel, how important is the mentor in that relationship?
Drew Badger
I think it's incredibly important. I think more and more people, I think, actually, with with Corona, now you're going to see a lot more people doing kind of personal learning things, or the home learning landscape is going to be transformed by that. So people learning more with their parents or people related to them or just in their community. But the the idea of mentorship, not only are you getting someone who's been there before, they can look at the mistakes you have, and they can maybe understand or try to say Oh, like, you know, obviously something like Fredrik, it's not looking at your mouth or actually listening to the way you pronounce sounds, because it's much more about reading than trying to communicate in a certain way. But the person who's reviewing it, like a tool can tell you if you're using it correctly, or also, and this is even more powerful, but give you that that motivation to say fantastic, you did it. So we try to put that into the app, you know, with the little guy, we didn't even come up with a name for him. Actually, the idea for the app is that it's supposed to be a kind of an alien, like crash landed on earth. And the device that you have is actually some kind of device that he's trapped in. And we want to put new clicky spaceship pieces or something like that. I think as I as it's not even complete yet, I want to add more things to it. But part of that is because we wanted to not just have a system where you're looking at things, but you're motivated, and you're excited to do it. And the adult or teacher can provide that same feedback. So it's great for motivation, but also giving you that like, Hey, you should do this or trying to push you in a new way, or try applying something in a different
Homeschool Together
way. Well, for what it's worth, our daughter loves the little celebrating alien.
One of the things that I've noticed that she's really gravitated to, and maybe you can maybe expand on a little bit, but the the games website, it's the puzzle piece, or it's the shooting of the character, you know, the the block, or the characters kind of coming down and she's got, she hears the word, she's got to find it. You know, with our reading program, I think we've only gotten through maybe 13 of the letters and their sounds. But I've actually found that the more she plays the game, she's actually picking out sounds that she knows. And maybe she doesn't have all the vowels. I think right now we're only at one vote with letter A. But she's actually been picking up u and o and I using the context of the words around it. And I think that has actually brought her up a little bit. One of the big hurdles I had and I explained to a great, probably nauseating depth on our reading for podcasts we had a couple episodes ago, was the struggle that I had this just unbelievable struggle of the sounding out the words and watching her kind of shut down because she couldn't do it. But I've noticed using the app, and her her ability to kind of like, as you said, Intuit what that sound is. Maybe even by saying, Well, I know that T sound. And I know the P sound. But I may not know the you know, oh sound but I know those two, I heard the other two sounds. So I'm going to guess that's this one. And she gets it right. I think it's actually helped a lot kind of overcoming that sounding out and blending of the words together because she can, you know, the game has that element of, you know, speed. And so she has that sense of urgency. It's fun, she enjoys it. And it kind of pushes her through that maybe those barriers that maybe I was creating for doing kind of this old school, you know, over the shoulder type of education shoes kind of got a little bit more free and she was able to kind of overcome those problems. I've noticed that the last like week or two that she's been playing those games at a quicker rate.
Yeah, right before dinner tonight she was she was doing the one there's a dip for our listeners. there's a there's a game there where there's a puzzle piece. And there's three different sounds that you click on. And it says three different words and you're trying to find you're trying to fit the puzzle piece to the correct word in she did fun right before dinner tonight. And she was like, and she did and I heard her sound it out and then do it. And she hasn't learned any of those letters in
between she had the F in you and it's like, you didn't know those.
Right?
Homeschool Together
But she kind of did like I think that's the thing. And that's one thing that I've been doing in the reading curriculum last few weeks is I've actually had done some like very small spelling tests because I noticed that she's so auditory in her learning that I've been able to just, you know, say the word sounded out and then she actually can spell the word coming out of that. She wouldn't have been able to do it the other way around. Like you know sound Without the word, but she can actually spell it by hearing it. So the game actually has this really great element I think dovetails a lot with her learning style. Have you noticed different learning styles? And have you tried to adapt the the app towards that? Like there's an auditory, visual kinesthetic, kinesthetic? Have you tried to incorporate some of those ideas in there? Or is that not something that is your focus? I don't know.
Drew Badger
Well, first of all, I think it's great that you are, you're like, open to learning and trying things in a new way. And that you're even seeing Well, if we try something different, she could benefit from it. And it's the app is doing exactly what I designed it to do in that, and that's again, giving her a way to test something and to feel proud about doing that and to learn and she doesn't even realize she's learning. She's doing it. Because again, we as adults, we put that idea on that then like, okay, now this is a lesson because we're teaching reading, rather than when you just talk to your child in an everyday way about Yeah, that's a, that's a blue bird over there. And she's like, Oh, it's a bird. And it's blue. Like, that kind of makes it. And so that same kind of thing, if you relax and not try to put in front of the child that, okay, now it's school starting time, and we're going to do this and make you again, it's changing that kind of psychology of it, and making it more of a game where you discover something. But the real joy comes when you get to apply what you've learned in the app outside of it. And so if she's reading a book and saying, Yeah, like, I figured that out, like, I understand how that works. And they it's kind of a self reinforcing thing. But to speak directly to the, you know, the different modalities of learning, part of me as an educator, like disbelieves that in a way, but part of me also recognizes that if I can combine different ways of you know, like, in the same way that we have different styles of games in the app, like summer for spelling, some are for reading, some are for you know, doing sentences, and we've got speed, and we've got, you know, the things that you've mentioned about making it more of a challenging thing. And we can talk a little bit about gamification, how that works. But all those things are enabling whatever the strength of the child is, but really, it's I don't, I think most kids are able to do things in different ways, because all these skills are combined together. But I think what happens is that most people will, maybe what's a good way to express it like kind of, unfairly or in an in a not so I guess deserved way try to push a particular way of learning because they think like, Oh, my child is an ex kind of learner, when if you, I haven't seen a child or even an adult that the app didn't work for. And I think part of that is because it obviously has like sound, and you're enabling kids to do things by themselves. And you got the kinesthetic part is where you get to move things. I don't know, if you tried like the same level where your daughter is playing the that it looks like there's kind of like a press coming down with the different letters. And they're spelled differently. You can use that we actually built in redundancy into the app, depending on how people actually like to play. So if you try different things, and this is something I don't like to explain to people, because it's more fun when they discover it, but you can actually tilt your screen and that will move the cannon pack for
Homeschool Together
if you didn't discover that already. Yeah, our daughter does that. Okay, I like that one. Because it's, it's got nonsense words in there. Because sometimes if the, if the words are all real, and she knows, like the first letter, she'll be like, oh, only one of these starts with F. And I know it's start, you know, and so, but that one's good, because it trips her up, and she has to stop and think.
Drew Badger
Yep, and that's, that's the whole point. So we wanted something that would actually not only make it more challenging for kids, but actually prove they can do it. And so that's again, another reason why you take what you do in Frederick, and then try to write the words down or even have her try to sound them out. So you can take a word like fun. And if you notice, Oh, she she keyed into that word for whatever reason. You say, hey, try to like write this down on paper on a whiteboard, or try to make magnets and try to make that word again. And so you can take the sounds and you can say, oh, like, can you sound it out? Rather than Can you spell it out, which is kind of a step removed, and it's a little bit more challenging. But if you say, can you sound this out, she will say up, and then take that and then make those out of letters or something like that. But it gives you lots of different opportunities to try that. I think that the reason I'm not such a big believer in the different modalities of learning is because I think a lot of the it's because people are still using the same fundamental idea of teacher teaches child, and then we're gonna try to, it's almost like a gimmicky kind of thing where we're going to do that in different ways. So I'm going to have the child remember my rote learning lesson by jumping up and down or I'm going to do it by writing or I'm going to do it by making them watch something. But those are all if you imagine kind of the learning on branches of a tree, if you go back more to the trunk, it's more about discovering things for yourself. And then it doesn't matter how exactly you learned that it's more like I understood how something works simply because it was presented to me in a logical way, where only one thing was different than like you mentioned before about the science experiments in school. That's what this is, it is a it is a science experiment, or you're making a hypothesis about something, this letter probably makes that sound Let me test to see if it does, oh, well, it actually worked. Now I have a kind of rule, and I'm building up my own system without even realizing
Homeschool Together
it. But part of what you're probably angling towards is the entertainment aspect that you know, it's something you enjoy doing. And then you learn easier by enjoyment. You talked a little bit about gamification, and that kind of goes right to my heart. You know, I do some I do writing is just kind of a hobby and gamifying my, the number of words I've written and trying to get to a certain goal by numbers or crossing things, my wife will attest how much I love crossing things off on lists, even software development life of being out, you know, doing Kanban boards and seeing the satisfaction of moving things across and finishing them. You know, can you talk a little bit about the gamification aspect that you embedded into the to the app?
Drew Badger
Sure. So this again, goes back to the idea, I want to be clear for people the things you mentioned about, you know, you're feeling good, okay, I finished, this is why people like to do lists, and they get to check off the things as they're going or the the idea about the credit card before because you know, even if one credit card has a lot more debt on it, we feel good about having crossed that credit card off the list. And when you're looking at what I thought about for the game, as far as gamification, you've probably heard about this in you know, like a language learning app like Duolingo, which is giving you prizes for essentially doing traditional learning. So that's not actual gamification, even though people call it that. And that's because it's become more of a buzzword. But the gamifying of something actually means you're, you're literally being able to discover something yourself like a game. And if you look at like the original Super Mario Brothers is one example that I use with people a lot. They put you. There's a great video on YouTube, if you haven't seen it already. Maybe you have as a game designer, but it's about Shigeru Miyamoto, who's the creator of Super Mario Brothers. He's explaining it in Japanese, but it's got English subtitles. But he's explaining how they developed world one, one. So that's the first level in Mario Brothers. Later, after they had already developed a bunch of other things. And so they're beginning by thinking, how do we teach the player how to do something without teaching the player explicitly. And you do that through the level design. And one of the things the first thing you notice when you start playing is that the opening screen of one one begins with Mario at the far left and the screen facing to the right. And so that keys the player into Oh, I bet. Like even if I don't know what to do, I'm probably should be moving from left to right. And and that's one thing, you start experimenting, if I you know, give my younger child or sister or something like that the control pad, and I don't explain to them how to do anything. They look at that. And they they Intuit that. And then again, it's a hypothesis being developed, and then you start figuring out, okay, should I do that? And then, okay, and now an enemy is is walking up to me, what do I do to that? If I do nothing, he hits me
Unknown Speaker
and I die. Yeah, that Goombas coming.
Drew Badger
Exactly. And so they they thought, and it's really just interesting to see how meticulous they were about teaching all of the different skills you would need. And they give you power ups, they show you how to jump, they show you how to how to get blocks, like they even show you like where the there's like a Goomba coming. And for people who don't know Super Mario Brothers, it's like a little mushroom looking enemy. There's a port very early on in level where you try to dodge the Goomba, you have to jump but that's where you bump in hit and hit like a block that turns into a flower or something like that. So they're tricking you almost believing you in a way where you think you discovered that, but it's them having developed a system where you figured that out. So there's kind of two levels of this, the the more basic one where people are saying, okay, we're going to give you traditional rote learning lessons. If you remember 10 words, I'm going to give you a sticker for today. But the actual gamification is where you get to discover the words yourself, and you figure that out. And it's an intrinsic reward that you get, in addition to the skill that you develop. So that's, that's more like, it's kind of taking it to a deeper level. But as I mentioned before about these different modalities of learning, where you've got kinesthetic or auditory or something like that, you don't really need to worry about all that as soon as you can figure out something for yourself.
Homeschool Together
Notice that when she's doing the scrolling, and she's trying to make different combinations of words She's always Her eyes are always looking down to the box to see if she's discovered a new word.
Right? She wants to see that new piece. And I love that that mode too with the with the dial. So for our listeners, it's it's dials with three. Well, she starts with three different letters and of course it will grow. And as you make different words, kind of pictograms Is that the right word pictograms come up and show what that is. So if it's cat sag, or bag, or whatever, they'll be icons showing. And she immediately understands what that is. I think her vocabulary has grown just by hearing, hearing those words and seeing that picture with him.
When she's discovered a new word like today's sag when she saw the, you know, it was a flatline. And then it kind of went down, she turned to me and said, Daddy, what is sag mean? Because she she keyed in on the fact that, you know, your app showed her the picture that, Oh, this is a real word. But she did. She hadn't actually learned that way. Maybe she didn't really understand what that meant. So I had to explain to her so she was, it was great, because now she was doing that discovery through learning.
Drew Badger
I just want to mention quickly about why we like everything was thought out very carefully about why we used icons rather than traditional pictures. And part of this comes I remember talking with actually, the principal or the owner of a school out here, when he was saying, shouldn't you have something that's like a bit more cartoony, or the like is like a bit more like eye catching or something like that rather than these icons. And I walked over to a deck of flashcards that he had. And I started showing him the flashcards but covering up what the word was, and I said, Tell me what this is. And he couldn't really tell me for quite a few of them. And so you will see like a flashcard, if you're learning typically as a second language, or even young kids or learning in school, you will have like a clown, eating a hot dog and standing on a ball or something like that. And if you look at that, if I if I if I tell you an alien language, or just, you know, Japanese, if I say that word is, you actually have no idea what I'm talking about. So I do as a teacher. And I might make an assumption that you've understood that but most people are not going to say oh, I don't actually understand what you're talking about. And then the lesson kind of continues with all these words that don't really mean anything. So what we've done is gone to try to make what is the most specific kind of essence of something. And obviously, we lose a little bit of nuance in that. And one of the reasons I want to actually improve the app with having multiple icons, it goes back to that same idea about triangulation. So one way to learn a second language, even teaching yourself to learn vocabulary is using a Google image search. So rather than having one translation of something, so if I teach you the word like Kashi in Japanese, and maybe you think that means whatever, but I say all that means bridge, and I can tell you that, but if you were to actually search for that in Japanese, and you would see all these different examples, and you would say, Okay, what is the essence that connects all of these different things. And so it's different kinds of bridges, and you recognize, okay, the, the idea here is probably bridge. And so that's why we made it originally as a set of icons that you would look at. But that's also a reason why it's not, it's not perfect for non native English learners. So the actual next step, the next app I want to release is more going into teaching grammar and vocabulary, and all of that, but in the same way, but actually making it so that it's clear what each of the words mean. So you would see something like sag or whatever. And it's a little bit clear from the animation what it might be. But as a parent, again, this is another good reason why you have the mentoring with the app. So if the parent is like, Okay, try to figure out what this means if you can explain that. Or you can show something else, okay? look like if I sit on the sofa, or the couch, like you can see that the chair kind of sags down a little bit, a little cushion kind of sags down. And so you can use those examples. Again, all of this is reinforcing the learning. And it's making more of almost like a web that helps you retain all that information rather than the single connection of something like translating a word.
Homeschool Together
Oh, that's terrific. Well, thank you so much, Drew, can you can you tell us where the app is available where where listeners can find out more information about it? I know we have some links in the show notes. But
Drew Badger
sure. So it's Frederick learn to read and you can find it on the App Store or Google Play. And also if you go to the English anyone.com or you can go to English anyone calm and look up Frederick as well. We have more information there. But the English anyone YouTube channel, if you search the word, Frederick on that channel, do a YouTube search there. You can see more videos that are explaining more about this, I talk more about how reading happens. I actually go into this example about Mario Brothers in a video that's already there. But there are a few different videos that explain more about how it works if you'd like the one thing About the app that's maybe a little bit tricky for people is that it doesn't have a bunch of explanations about how to use it. Again, because part of the using of the system itself is the discovery of how it works. So it's it's kind of a catch 22. And we're continuing to, as we test and try it out with more people figure out better ways to make things even more intuitive. But typically, if you give the app to kids, they will start pushing buttons and playing with it. Adults are a bit more hesitant about that. So they're looking more for, okay, how do I do this? What do I what's the next step here, but if you give it to kids, they just start poking things. And, you know, you can literally drop the app on an iPad, into Africa, actually, we can probably, we're probably going to be doing that actually, pretty soon, I was just speaking with, I think the world literacy Foundation, they want to start using the app with the kids in Africa. But you could take it and drop it anywhere, but it's even really ideally suited for non native or for native English speakers or us you're using it with your kids. Or if people want to use it in the classroom, we will be developing. The next thing we're working on, is making it so that you can share app data across different devices and then even across the platforms. So if you have an Android phone, and an iPhone, you would be able to let's say your daughter was playing levels one through three and she saved that she would be able to move to the opposite device, a different device and continue moving from there. You would also have multiple accounts. And then we want to make a version for our classrooms as well. But the Corbin was trying to make sure we have it all prepared and working perfectly for people who were using it, we're getting great results so far, even from again, non native speakers who are trying to learn English with it. And also for dyslexic kids as well. I think it's also helping some kids with dysgraphia. But dyslexia for sure. And yet we've got great data. And I'd love to learn more about how we can make it even better. So the more feedback we get, the better.
Homeschool Together
Well, fantastic. I know we've been incorporated into our learning curriculum, we really appreciate it, it's been a big piece of it. And I really, really appreciate you guys drew you spending time with us and talking about your app. And a lot of the I personally, I think from educators in homeschoolers, we'd like to think see the thinking behind because, you know, a lot of us come into this, that's just parents, and you know, we have a normal day job. And maybe we're not trained educators. But we're starting to get into homeschooling, it's really nice to see kind of the, how you've incorporated the theory, and a lot of the deeper thinking into, you know, such a nicely made app. And it helps us kind of get us up to speed.
Yeah, it's really been great. Thank you so much drew for taking all this time to educate us on in our listeners on your app.
Drew Badger
No, it's my pleasure. Again, I'm making this for everyone out there. And hopefully, I've struggled as a child when I was learning to read, get one last quick story. I remember sitting, I think I was in sixth or seventh grade and sitting in some parent teacher conference. And the teacher was telling my mom who was sitting next to me that I was two years behind where I should have been, and hearing that and seeing the face, you know, my mom kind of struggling to disguise the embarrassment and the frustration. But it was more you know, I could see as well for her trying to figure out how do I help this kid learn how to read I don't how do I get them excited about reading and, and a lot of it is just the traditional methods that people use not only for reading, but a lot of education, especially language learning, but it actually makes it unnecessarily difficult. And it goes against the way the brain is naturally trained to learn. So if you can do that, there's a lot less stress and kids improve a lot faster.