Lifelong Palisadian Matthew Colvard and his creative team have designed a reading program, “Pup’s Quest for Phonics,” that is being used at Corpus Christi School, Calvary Christian School and Village School and, this fall, in more than 50 other schools around Southern California.
Colvard, 31, is the creative director of a Palisades-based education/technology start-up that has built an iPad app (“Pup’s Quest”) that, he says, “can teach kindergarteners to read at the third-grade level in 25 weeks.”
In an e-mail to the Palisadian-Post, Colvard described the challenging road to his company’s launch:
“This project originally began as a dream of my father, Dr. Michael Colvard, one the nation’s preeminent eye surgeons, who has treated many residents of the Palisades. He grew up in one of the poorest parts of Georgia. His family owned a small cotton farm that was too small to make ends meet. Most of women in his family worked at the local cotton mill and his uncles worked at the granite quarry. His father drove an ice truck. Although his parents were not well educated themselves, their commitment to his education and the passion of his teachers made the difference in his life.
“Approaching the end of his distinguished career in eye surgery, my father wanted to try to make a difference in the lives of other children from similar backgrounds because he believes that every child in America should have an opportunity to rise to his or her highest level.
“He embarked on this project four years ago. Unfortunately, between his full-time job and lack of experience in children’s entertainment and education, things did not go so well—and after two years he was ready to quit. I was indignant. “What do you mean you’re quitting?” I told him. “You never let me quit soccer.” He laughed and challenged me to do better.
“At the time, I was recovering from a workplace incident at my old job as a carpenter at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (my fingertip got cut off working on the set of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.”) I had plenty of time on my hands so I accepted his challenge.
“There was a precedent for us working together. When I was in middle school, we collaborated on an ophthalmology device. We took a pair of surplus Russian night-vision goggles and inserted a special lens that allowed surgeons to measure the dilation of a pupil in complete darkness. This allowed surgeons to screen out candidates for Lasik surgery whose pupils dilated too wide and would experience horrible glare at night if they had surgery. That device paid my way through college.
“But to get back to the story, I hired some classmates I knew from college—animators Chaz Ganster (Palisadian) and Nancy Jean Tucker, a voice actor Matthew Varvil (Palisadian), a writer and a computer programmer Devin Rosen. We set to work adapting a teacher manual written by Dr. Diane McGuinness, a pioneering child psychologist who published a book titled “Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How to Teach Reading” to work as an animated set of games and stories on the iPad.
“I heard that one of my father’s patients was Phil Roman, who prior to his retirement was the lead animator on “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and executive producer of “The Simpsons.” We began to work closely with Phil to develop the look and feel of the animation as well as the storyline, which underpins the game.
“After a year of our team working together in New York City, the weather got the best of us and we decided to move the company to Pacific Palisades. We started in my parents’ garage in the Highlands.
“In May this year, we hired a longtime Palisades resident, Robert Ketterer, as our CEO, whom I actually met when I was hitchhiking home from working with Calvary School in the first week after moving back to the Palisades, before I had time to buy a car.”
The program is a phonics-based program that starts with how letters sound, not how they are pronounced.
Children learn the sound that a letter, such as W makes, as a friendly-looking dog takes them through the paces. After a student learns the sound, he hears several words that began with the sound, such as wig, wind, why and where.
Once they hear the sound, a cute catchy song stresses the sound that is in different words. Afterwards, students are then asked which of two items began with the “w” sound. For example, is it a wig or a star? When a student selects correctly, like in a game, a flower grows.
The next stage of learning the sound is tracing the letter on the screen that makes the sound. Once a student has done that, they can race the main character, the dog, to see who draws the letter correctly first.
From there, students practice writing words from sounds they’ve learned prior (it is a program that builds on prior skills). There is a story at the end of each session and then a review.
Matthew explains that the program is based on McGuinness’ findings that learning to read successfully is based on phonics where each sound is introduced initially with a single basic code spelling.
The challenge is there are 40 sounds that have more than 400 spellings. For example, “shun” said as a suffix, is spelled several different ways, such as “sion,” “tion” and “cion” (and not one of them is shun.)
The program begins with consonants and short vowels. Once children have mastered those words, they are introduced to the long vowels and then finally spelling exceptions.
The program was first implemented at Willows in 2012. Kindergarten students not only learned to read, but many were reading at the third grade level by the end of the period.
The program is interactive, the music catchy and Colvard said that after reading was over, more than 50 percent of the students, opted to “play” Pup’s Quest over other app games.
If students have individual iPads, they can also work at their own pace, which is preferable to waiting until each student finally has a concept.
Colvard, a Harvard-Westlake graduate who received his degree in music with a minor in architecture from Wesleyan in 2004, would like to see the program available in all schools, but “It’s hard for the little guy to go up against Houghton Mifflin, Scholastic and Pierson, who have 85 percent of the textbook market.
“For this year, we are giving the program free to any school, if they will allow us to do pre- and post-testing,” Colvard said. “Up until we launch it in the app Store in November, if someone sends me an e-mail, I’ll send them a free pre-release version.”
“I’d love to get this product out to people in the Palisades, said Ketterer, the father of three. His oldest will be a sophomore at Stanford this year. “I’ve invested in different businesses, but this is near and dear to my heart.”
Visit: pupsquest.com.
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