Behind the Design: Electronic Phonics
It’s time for our second edition of Behind the Design, and this month the product we are focusing on our COVID baby, Electronic Phonics, which was Highly Commended at the BETT awards last year. We spoke to Steve Walls who worked on the design on all about how it came to be.
How did Electronic Phonics begin?
It was originally meant to just be a simple little tablet device. And we even created a basic specification for it. However, we spoke to some teachers and phonics experts and realized there was a real gap in the market for an interactive tool that children could use independently – that was also self-checking, so the children could know the right answer without a practitioner to hand. We were told the children would learn better if it was a form of game, so this led us to come up with the idea of adding a display that shows the number of correct answers in segmentation mode.
As well as the phonics experts and the teachers, was there anyone else who was influential in these early stages?
Oh yes, we worked very closely with Barbara Derbyshire, who is a Literary Consultant and Regional Advisor throughout the project. Not only did she help us with the concept development, but she also wrote all our teaching content and guides about electronic phonics as well as manually drawing up the attribution table of all the possible phoneme combinations, which was incredibly useful. Electronic Phonics covers 842 words, which means it can sufficiently cover the needs of both the curriculum and phonics screening tests.
We also worked very closely with the QA team through the various stages of the prototyping before we could sell it to the market.
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Tell us more about the prototyping stages.
When we come up with the idea, we first have to build the concept to show to our panel of teachers. Once we have their feedback, this is when we can start building dummy versions.
It’s in these stages that we can start to figure out some of the practical details. One of the important things we’ve learned over the years is how impractical it is for most teachers to have equipment that requires batteries. This often leads to the teachers having to buy batteries themselves and having difficulty disposing of old batteries. This meant when we were designing Electronic Phonics, we knew we wanted it to be rechargeable to save everyone the hassle.
After testing the dummies, we use what is called Stereolithography (SLA), which is when we professionally 3D print a version of a product with all the working parts inside, so we can check things such as sound quality.
Also, when we were designing the mechanism for the machine to read the phonemes, we were originally going to use RFID technology, which is the same system that you have in a door fob! However, through our testing, we realized that it would be significantly cheaper to print a code on each tile that can be read optically by a sensor. It’s important to us not just to keep the price down for ourselves, but with budget concerns in schools we want to be able to make the product both as cheap and versatile as possible for the consumer without losing on functionality. And we were highly commended last year, so we must be doing something right!
If you would like to check out our Electronic Phonics range, you can do so here: