Early learning education programs are not new —they’ve been around for years in multiple forms. Whether that’s Dora the Explorer taking you on her latest adventure, or hopping on your computer to travel along the Oregon Trail, the traditional education system has been supplemented with various platforms and programs for ages. The issue is, though, very few of them actually show or measure tangible results.

That’s Stephanie Dua, the Co-founder and President of HOMER, an early learning program that is primarily focused on helping children get the best possible start to their education. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Stephanie explains how she was in a unique opportunity to not only help jump-start her own daughter's education, but to bring a scalable education product to market. She also explains what separates HOMER from its competitors and why phonemic awareness is the secret to the product’s success.

Main Takeaways

• Educating and Entertaining: There are multiple gaps in the education system that have created complexity when it comes reading comprehension. By streamlining and simplifying the reading process for kids, HOMER is creating a less messy hand-off system that is providing kids with the foundational skills needed and it’s working in a way that can scale.
• Can I Get Some Feedback?: Feedback loops are incredibly important in designing a personalized education program for young children. The more a student engages with the program, the more the A.I. and machine learning abilities of the platform learn the likes and dislikes of the student, but also the comprehension level of the student. So not only is the program then offering personalized content to each student, it’s also continuously challenging them.
• Have to Give them a Reason to Learn: Studies by the HOMER team prove that kids have a natural desire to learn, but the key ingredient is finding a way to present learning to them to where it is fun and enjoyable. This means creating multiple programs based on a kid's individual likes and dislikes. If a kid naturally likes baseball, and you are constantly providing them with content that is centered around bugs, the likelihood of engagement drops, but if the same content is presented in the form of baseball, the child is much more likely to re engage with the process.

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