Thanks for being here!

What I'm doing

I have some big hairy audacious goals.

The immediate goal: Affordable early literacy

I am building a high-quality, low-cost early literacy application: LettersPractice.com. This work is nearing the finish line. Right now I'm pricing this at $20, but I'm pretty confident that I can get the unit cost of teaching a toddler to read down to a dollar or less (up to the good graces of static hosting services like github-pages).

The broader goal: composable edTech

I am building an open source runtime for generic educational content, tooling to build custom courses, and a set of declarative standards for curriculum sharing. This way, a physics or a chemistry or a machine learning curriculum can pluck specific prerequisite skills from a mathematics course, and the math course will do the work of figuring out how to satisfy it. Software style composition for curriculum.

Where I'm going

My preferred success story here is for this software to occupy a space like lichess among the surge of modernized edtech offerings. Open, free, and competitive against commercial offerings.

Besides the ideological bent, there are practical reasons for such software to exist: an open runtime serving a variety of curriculum can

• better exploit the effects of interleaving - mixing of content from different domains in order to
• better understand the broader context and goals of learners
• benefit from composition and reuse
• reduce overhead and churn of learning and evaluating new produces, interfaces, etc.

You can help!

If you think educational tools should be public utilities, or if you think early literacy should be broadly accessible, you could sponsor this work.

Where your money goes: Every dollar of sponsorship here creates a scholarship at LettersPractice.com, granting full accounts to families who made productive use of the one month free trial but were unable to scale the paywall.

Pledge

My hope is that some commercial offerings can make this work sustainable.

In the event that I'm unable to continue on the project, the existing application will be made available as a statically deployed site (with slightly degraded experience), and all code and curriculum will be open sourced under AGPL.