Kelly Hertig Uses Kickstarter to Fund Patent of Educational Reading Tool with Book, “The Purple Ball”

Arizona college sophomore, Kelly Hertig, has created an innovative educational tool allowing children to continuously improve their reading skills using the known context of the book to help them move up each reading level.  Kelly is utilizing the website Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to secure this idea. 

Children love having books read to them and, as they start to read themselves, they often read the books they love over and over again. Unfortunately, this repetition doesn’t provide much added benefit. As the child’s reading progresses, the book is left behind for more challenging reading.  This patent pending concept aims to change all that.

Kelly Hertig decided to create an innovative strategy that would remedy this problem. What if a beginning reading book simply offered additional lines of text, telling the same story but offering more challenging words and concepts? In this way, the book offers an ongoing challenge – providing additional reading levels or “tiers” within the context of a familiar book. This multi-tiered approach capitalizes on the known story-line and gives further pleasure and additional vocabulary from a well-loved book.

“The beauty of this concept is that the same book now provides additional challenge with the benefit of known context to speed the learning process,” says Hertig. The multi-tiered approach can offer as few as two or three tiers and as many as seven tiers or more. Hertig uses a large, colorful font for the first level, and then prints subsequent higher level tiers in smaller and smaller font sizes to correspond to the more mature reader. She has written “The Purple Ball” to showcase the concept in a clever and compelling children’s book.

“We need to secure the official patent and want to get the book published, so we’re using an innovative website called Kickstarter to raise the necessary funds,” Hertig states. Kickstarter.com has had some massive successes recently with other concepts raising hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars within 30 – 45 days. “The goal is to raise about $15,000 and we’ve just started to get the word out.” Individuals that want to see a clear overview and video about the concept can visit www.kickstarter.com and search for “reading concept” to get additional information. Financial support is welcomed and easy to do on Kickstarter by simply clicking on the green “back this project” button. Pledges can range from $1 to $1,000.

The ultimate goal is to be in a position to offer this multi-tiered approach to every children’s book author and publisher. By using this innovation, every children’s book would provide a far richer and long-term benefit to children. Additionally, publishing electronic books would provide an even more seamless experience. Each tier could be displayed singly, with subsequent tiers revealed as the child progresses – even offering richer and more complex versions of the illustrations to further provide an incentive for achieving higher reading tiers.

Hertig is presenting this to educators, publishers, and even technology companies in hopes of raising the required funds. Their Kickstarter program ends May 25th, 2012 so time is of the essence. 

Contact Information

Tom Hertig

Creator

Search Control

(1) 480 888 6420

thertig@cox.net