This program dates back to 1986. It was originally built to run on Commodore 64 personal computers, one of the
early PCs then being purchased by elementary schools for children to use. At the time, I was working on a
government-funded project exploring how these new computers might help young children learn. My team and I were
particularly interested in children who were having difficulty learning to read because of dyslexia.
The program, which we called TurboScan, produced encouraging results with many of the children selected by our
partner schools to participate in our evaluations. Eye-tracking data showed that their visual scanning of text
became more efficient, and tests of oral reading ability given before and after a six-week period of TurboScan
practice showed meaningful improvement.
After several years, continued funding for the research and development was no longer available, despite the
encouraging results, and my career took me in other directions. Now, 40 years later, I’m interested in making
the basic idea behind TurboScan available again—to parents, teachers, and researchers who may want to try the
approach with children who are learning to read.
The original Commodore 64 version was greatly limited by the computer hardware of the time and by the tiny
amount of data that could fit on a floppy disk. As a result, there was little opportunity for users to customize
the program.
That is very different with this new version. My hope is that a community of users will experiment with and
expand upon TurboScan’s basic idea: a scanning window moves across text along the path that a fluent reader’s
eyes would normally follow, while the learner practices identifying and responding to what appears in the
window. Users can create new kinds of practice content and, if they choose, make that content available to other
TurboScan users and their children.
For that reason, this version includes several features that children using TurboScan will never see, and that
many parents and teachers may never need. They are there for people who want to customize or extend the program.
A full-featured content Editor can be used to create new reading “screens.” A Librarian lets
users retrieve those screens and organize them into Sequences, and then combine sequences into
Chains that can be assigned to individual learners.
TurboScan also keeps detailed statistics on a learner’s performance. Parents and teachers can subscribe to
automatically emailed progress reports, while researchers may find the underlying performance data and reporting
system useful for studies involving TurboScan.
Finally, I’ve included a Community forum where users can ask questions, exchange ideas, share what
they have learned, and get answers from me and from other users. My hope is that, over time, TurboScan can
become not just a program, but a platform for people interested in exploring and improving this approach to
reading practice.
The untangle letters game that clicks for young readers
TurboScan uses a focused sliding-window technique to help many children with dyslexia build reading skills and
confidence.
It comes with pre-designed content. But it also lets parents and teachers create personalised reading content.
Children just sit down and go.
the big dog and pup play
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