Worcestershire

Inspiration

In recent years, child literacy rates in America have been declining. For tutors like us, this statistic and the challenge it poses is a stark reality. The rules of English phonics are many and baffling — where do you even start teaching a first grader how to read? What about a fifth grader? Worcestershire, ironically, cuts out the confusion.

What it does

Worcestershire identifies exactly which sound systems of English phonics a child struggles with. Currently, Worcestershire supports identification for these sound systems:

Short vowel CVC words
Long vowels with silent e
Long vowels with 13 unique vowel teams To determine a child's areas of weakness, Worcestershire prompts them to read a short passage out loud, scores their pronunciation of graphemes within the three target sound systems, and returns a breakdown of their performance for each supported sound system.

From there, Worcestershire returns a more accurate assessment of a child's skill set with practice passages targeting more specific graphemes.

How we built it

React TS, Vite - backend and frontend Microsoft Azure Speech (Pronunciation Assessment) - returning accuracy scores for passage phonemes

Challenges we ran into

Mapping IPA to English Graphemes - Microsoft Azure's Pronunciation Assessment returns an accuracy for a word's phonemes, identified by an IPA character. However, multiple graphemes in English produce the same phoneme, so we had to produce an English grapheme-IPA phoneme mapping.

Narrowing down which phonic sound systems to cover - There are too many English phonetic rules to target in one hackathon project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to use a Microsoft Azure product for the first time

Setting up the microphone to record speech and pass it to Microsoft Azure's Pronunciation Assessment

What we learned

How to use Microsoft Azure

Worcestershire is pronounced "wuh-stuh-shr"

What's next for Worcestershire

Add additional phonics sounds systems (eg. r-controlled vowels, consonant blends, etc.)
More numerous and more gamified practice modules
User credentials
Database