The ultimate aim of the “Digital Primer” (DP) project is development, optimization and deployment of digital education instrument (Bildunginstrument) for fostering of acquisition of basic literacy in primary school pupils. DP has two sub-projects:

a “physical” Personal Primer (π2) branch focuses on design of a post-smartphone open hardware artefact based on “Raspberry Pi Zero” technology.

the “Web Primer” sub-project provides extended functionality in browser

Both sub-projects provide audiotext support, implement human-machine peer learning curricula and use Mozilla’s DeepSpeech acoustic models embelished with our own exercise-specific language models.

Palope is a Fibel developed by prof. Christa Röber (Germanistik / Pädagogik, Uni Freiburg) and her team

the essence of Fibel is the scaffolding sequence - from simplest syllables to evermore complex structures

in Palope, the trochaic structure of German language is exploited to maximum to facilitate the Einstieg in the world of written letters

good design choices (not phoneme-driven but syllable-driven) many interesting inovations (color coding of different syllable types) and cognitivelly powerful methods (e.g. "Silbentepiche")

and it is a community project ! (e.V., all OERs under Creative Commons etc.)

Time for a little demo

the Primer should not replace the human teacher but assist her (e.g.by keeping track of what individual children know and do not know)

adapt the Primer to the child and not child to the Primer (all our speech recognition models run on our own servers / local hardware and can easily adapt to a concrete pupil or group of pupils)

as the child learns, so does the Primer (we call this "Human Machine Peer Learning")

Achtung, Gefahr: !!! by focusing too much on the technical, AI-related side of things, one may easily fall into trap of poor pedagogical practices !!!

Web Primer allows wider public to benefit from our growing collection of open educational resources (OERs) without necessity to build a physical Primer. Frontend is a Progressive Web App, backend is a quite sophisticated "knowledge graph". Artificial Intelligence, speech technologies (notably automatic speech recognition ASR) and so-called audio-text play an important role. Current modules:

👄 lesen (ASR)

👂 hören (multi-voice)

👩🏼‍💻 trainieren and 💯 testen (human-machine peer learning)

🎴 memory (single-player) spielen