Cheekyheads - the young reader's digital library

"<< Background >>Members of both partner organisations are personally affected by this challenge, as we are surrounded by children aged 6-10 years old. We also drew from regrettable experiences and personal experiences (like ""Oh, this book is too long, I won't read it!"") when we started brainstorming about the project. Unfortunately, in our experience, functional illiteracy is now a feature of a large part of society that calls itself literate. We find that many people are often unable to understand even very short texts. With this app, we wanted to contribute to the eradication of functional illiteracy, which is a real and very serious problem.We wanted to prevent it (because we believe that prevention is the most effective tool) with the age group that is learning to read. Our plan was to create a nice, cute mobile phone application with interactive features. We wanted to give a virtual reading book in the hands of children aged 6-10, to develop both reading and digital skills.<< Objectives >>We wanted to develop reading and digital skills among children aged 6-10 years. It is of utmost importance that the use of digital tools is not limited to the currently widely used, self-centred social media (although reading texts with understanding is necessary there too.) We have found that shorter texts help children to experience reading. As a consequence, we hope they will explore longer texts in the future. It may also help them in their learning at school, as longer texts are currently found in all reading books. The long-term goal of Cheekyheads is to provide a way for children to love reading longer, larger books, the short-term goal of the app is to improve independent reading.In addition to the above, we wanted to develop language skills and reading ability, which is a natural progression of vocabulary development.To achieve these goals, we wanted to create a comprehensive reading app that would help children to read and learn together with their parents and/or teachers.<< Implementation >>We undertook the creation of a mobile phone application with 50 richly illustrated stories in Hungarian, Spanish and English. The app has been created and is available for download from the two biggest app stores (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store) (see Attachment_1). At the moment, 53 stories are available instead of 50, as planned (see Attachment_2), but we will add more stories beyond the project's lifetime (April 2024).We have found that not everyone is interested in the app as a downloadable framework, but rather in the content. We have therefore made the stories public on the official website. The interactive website in three languages and the stories it contains are available to everyone at www.cheekyheads.com (see Attached_3)We created 3 official Facebook pages for the project (Spanish, Hungarian and English) in order to reach as many native speakers as possible. These have reached thousands of interested people (see Attached_4).We have also had personal contacts with schools and cultural centres open to this, such as the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Bilingual Primary School in Hungary and the Collegi Sant Miquel in Spain.<< Results >>A framework with the technical specifications agreed has been created (for both smartphones and tablets). The digital library has been uploaded and is being continuously updated: 53 stories have been published so far. We will publish more stories after the submission of the final report.We wanted to make children more open-minded, to learn more easily and quickly, and to see reading not just as a task, but as a form of fun.For example, when we performed at the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Primary School in Budapest, we saw the children's interest in our stories first hand. And the teachers were delighted to hear that the children were enjoying the stories. We presented the stories in an interactive way: first we read them 4 summaries, from which they chose the 2 most interesting ones, then we read them these 2 complete stories and announced a ""winner"" among the children with their participation. (see Attached_5)Based on the feedback, we see that the process has started. After all this, it is worthwhile and necessary to continue the communication. The same was our experience when talking to families about their experiences with the finished app."