★ Research & evidence

Built on evidence. Honest about results.

Lumi is built on the Science of Reading. We are committed to rigorous evidence of efficacy — including any null or negative findings.

First study planned for late 2026.

In partnership with our pilot schools. We will publish results here — including any null or negative findings. Transparency is the whole point.

Until then, methods from what we know.

Structured phonics, phonemic awareness, interleaved sight-word practice, progress-driven pacing. Lumi mirrors the scope-and-sequence of UFLI Foundations and CKLA — open programs with robust evidence behind them.

What we are measuring

Five signals. Tracked from day one.

Pre/post reading assessment scores

NWEA MAP, DIBELS — gold-standard literacy benchmarks.

Oral reading fluency

Words correct per minute (once microphone ships in Phase 2).

Skill mastery rate

Atoms reaching stable mastery per session-minute.

Retention

Percent of children who return for a session three or more days after first use.

Parent-reported confidence

Weekly self-rating of child's reading mood.

What we are building

Build journal.

Short notes on what shipped recently and the design choices behind each release. The newest entries are at the top.

2026-05-24Curriculum

Cipher Citadel + Aurelian Forum — 6th-grade reading band

L17 ships fifteen 5-7 sentence nonfiction passages on cryptography, linguistics, logic, and economics, with multi-clue inference and evidence-based answer choices. L18 is the civic mirror — Roman republics, habeas corpus, the Constitution, vaccines, AI ethics — and tightens the focus on author's purpose. Both lean on stronger Latin and Greek roots (crypt, log, civ, demo, anthrop, philo). Lumi's reading band now reaches grade six.

2026-05-24Curriculum

Whispering Atlas + Stargazer Hall — 5th-grade reading band

L15 introduces 4-5 sentence passages spanning geography, ecology, and space, with multi-clue inference and academic vocabulary. L16 widens into cause/effect and sequence — food chains, glaciers, Edison's lab, internet packets. Greek and Latin roots (aqua, photo, mar, terr, struct, ject) become first-class. progress.ts already knew about L15-L18, so no schema changes were needed.

2026-05-23Game

The Shapes Club — Lumi's first standalone game module

A voice-driven shape-naming game for ~6yo, gated to its own /games/shapes-club route so the play and math shells stay focused. Voice matching cascades from exact tokens through normalized Levenshtein and a tiny phonetic pass; after two voice misses, it silently flips into a three-option tap fallback. Audio reuses the existing ElevenLabs + Vercel Blob pipeline; SFX are WebAudio-synthesized so there are no asset files to ship.

2026-05-23Curriculum

Cogwheel Plains + Sundial Workshop — 4th-grade math

M7 brings multi-digit addition and subtraction, area-as-array, perimeter counting, and missing-digit puzzles. M8 promotes facts to larger products (mult_fact_large), real division facts, factor questions, and skip-counting above ten. Each task UI was added alongside the new stimulus kinds, and the math registry's signature switch grew accordingly. Lumi's math band now covers K through grade four.

2026-05-19Engine

Adaptive Pacing Engine wired into PlayShell

Seven composed rules pick the next task from the child's recent attempts: recover from misses, vary modality, refresh from the mastery interleave queue, and protect against streaks of the same atom. The new /api/child/pacing-context route hydrates the engine on session start; an in-session attempt ring buffer keeps it informed without a round-trip per task.

2026-05-18Curriculum

Tide-Mark Library + Owl Atrium — 4th-grade reading band

Comprehension becomes the first-class scope above grade three. L13 introduces Greek and Latin roots and a morphology tree task. L14 focuses on main idea, key details, and short inference across 4-sentence passages. Phonics retires; the TaskType union widened, ReadingLevelNum was extended to 18, and the play shell now switches task queues based on the level's category.

Working on an efficacy study with us?

Reach out at research@lumikids.dev.