BAFTA Award nomination for Education lecturers' online reading game
- Tuesday, November 10, 2015
The latest game in the free online Teach Your Monster To Read series funded by the Usborne Foundation, set up by Peter Usborne, founder and managing director of Usborne Publishing, has been nominated for a BAFTA Children’s Award.
The games in this series have been developed in collaboration with Roehampton academics to help children succeed in learning to read. Angela Colvert, Senior Lecturer in English Education within Roehampton’s School of Education, and Alison Kelly, former Principal Lecturer at Roehampton, helped design the educational content in the games which are rooted in the principles of systematic synthetic phonics and offer an opportunity for children to practise the skills they are learning in school. The games are compatible with Phases Two to Five of the UK Letters and Sounds Programme, and with other major systematic synthetic phonics programmes.
The most recent nominated game, Champion Reader, builds on children’s existing knowledge of letter-sounds and has a strong focus on developing children’s skills in reading more fluently and for meaning. The game also provides further blending and segmenting practice, and children gain extensive sentence practice by playing. The series of games has received widespread praise from parents, teachers and pupils.
During the design process Angela Colvert and Alison Kelly collaborated with the talented game designers at Popleaf in order to create enjoyable challenges which draw children in to a fictional world on an exciting adventure in which they use and develop their new-found skills.
Teach Your Monster to Read: Champion Reader has been nominated for the best original interactive media experience for children aged 16 and under, for the way it engages new and developing readers. The winner will be announced in a central London ceremony on 22 November.
The University of Roehampton is one of the capital’s largest and most experienced providers of education and teacher training qualifications. Through our oldest College, Whitelands, we have a history of training teachers which stretches back almost 175 years.