OAKLAND, CA / ACCESSWIRE / September 4, 2024 / U.S. students' proficiency in reading is on a historic decline. While most educators are painfully aware of this academic crisis, according to a survey conducted in March 2023 by the group ‘Learning Heroes', 90 percent of parents think their children are doing fine academically. Standardized testing, however, shows that only 58 percent of 8^th graders are reading at or above their grade level.

While the pandemic certainly contributed to the problem, it's not the only culprit. Results from the esteemed New York Times June 21, 2023 article titled ‘What the New, Low Test Scores for 13-Year-Olds Say About U.S. Education Now' by Dana Goldstein reveal that the reading performance of 13-year-olds in the United States hasn't been this low since 2004.

Garlin Cephas, a retired IT manager turned inner-city-school teacher and principal, has created a family of gamified vocabulary apps that he hopes will change these alarming statistics.

VocaBit Build puts a new spin on building vocabulary through games like bingo and 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe. Unlike the vocabulary-building gamification apps currently available, two levels of the VocaBit Build app - 3rd-6th grades and 6th-college - offer the opportunity for individual and large-scale competition. Speed up the clock to better a prior performance or vie with hundreds of others in virtual or in-person contests.

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For Cephas, creating a competitive environment, no matter how much kids love that, wasn't enough. Too many of the high school students he interacted with no longer even dared to dream. There had to be a way for parents or caregivers to help get their children back on track academically, even if they didn't speak English or have a computer or connectivity at home. So, in 2016, he started working on developing a fun, user-friendly app that parents and guardians could use and even customize.

It's taken seven years, but the Android-version of VocaBit Build has finally launched. The Android apps make it easy to improve vocabulary and other key skills, with no need for phone or Wi-Fi services after the initial install. "By running on current and out-of-service devices, my apps provide remediation support to families who cannot afford phones and related services," says Cephas. Students' scored results can be reviewed by the caretaker or emailed to a teacher or the host of a competition.

In addition, all both versions of the VocaBit Build app offer a translation feature that covers 34 different languages. "This removes the intimidation for non-English-speaking caregivers by empowering them as they provide real time support to their English-learning student," he says.

Each version of the app, which costs $3, provides three to four years of language and reading support to under-performing students for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

While Cephas's primary objective was to help students who are deficient, the app can also benefit those performing at higher levels. For starters, they can simply access a more advanced version of the app. But they can also download their own list of vocabulary and definitions into the app and use that as the basis for the games.

In fact, any set of facts or terminology with a prompt-and-response format can be loaded into Cephas's app and turned into a virtual contest for up to 500 people. A new game's goal could be to ease the medical or law school learning curve, promote an author's book, improve American students' dismal math scores, or anything else. Once the host has developed a set of prompts and responses, using the VocaBit app to structure the file-which can then be posted to a website or emailed-takes just five minutes. As soon as the players download the file to their phone, VocaBit automatically formats the data so they're ready to compete.

For more information about Garlin Cephas's VocaBit Build apps, visit www.VocaBiTclassroom.com or reach out to him at vocabitbuild@vocabitclassroom.com.

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SOURCE: Garlin Cephas Consulting