Winning With Numbers: Automatic Speech Recognition for the teaching of Number-Fluency

'Winning With Numbers' (WWN) is a digital resource for the teaching and learning of Number-fluency. It has been developed by award-winning business Harding Education. This project will apply an **automated speech recognition** facility to the learning platform.

The outcome of the project will be that children log on to a device at home and/or school, accessing the next step in their personal Number-Fluency learning journey and _receiving a replication of the_ _face-to-face_ _teaching process their class teacher would take if teaching one-to-one_. Since children are part of a larger class/group at school, their current verbal responses to the teacher's Number-fluency teaching questions are submerged within a group response or have to be transferred into a written 'show me' response.

This dilutes the level of personal attention in class. The quality of teaching inevitably lowers further when setting homework or independent learning activities specific to Number-fluency.

However, with **automated speech recognition integrated into the WWN curriculum design** the WWN learning platform will:

1. Show each child a short, animated, teaching video that is carefully mapped to the child's own next stage of development.

2. Ask each child to gradually join the digital teacher in a narrow set of questions that are carefully mapped to the video's teaching point.

3. Move each child on to answering questions independently and orally, without the need to write or type; just as they would with a face-to-face, one-to-one, teacher. For example, the child may need to say, '5, 10, 15, 20, 25', and the 'listening' to the child's response is completed digitally by the AI speech recognition. Or, the child may be faced with the question '67 + 85 = ' and the platform will be able to listen to the child's fluent thinking, '140, 12....152!'.

4. Provide each child with feedback that either, i) requires the child to stay and practice to improve oral Number-fluency at the current step before moving on, or, ii) moves the child on to their next step of learning because they have _orally_ demonstrated the required level of fluency, or, iii) identifies the child has a learning gap from earlier in the journey, then providing the child with personalised support teaching to address their individual gap.

The application of **automated speech recognition** in this context will prove crucial in advancing Winning With Numbers into a new generation of learning platforms, being the first of its kind for teaching and assessing multi-part Number-fluency.