EarlyBird Education: the game-based pre-literacy screening app

EarlyBird Education is a startup behind a game-based app that detects early literacy challenges, such as dyslexia, in children as young as four. The assessment is a game of about 20 minutes played on a tablet. A friendly toucan named Pip guides the child through tasks such as touching the picture that matches a spoken word, finding rhyming words and picking the picture that matches a spoken sentence. Children can run the assessment themselves. Afterwards the program builds a risk profile and points teachers, parents and pediatricians to a dashboard, customized resources and evidence-based tools for next steps.

The idea grew from Massachusetts law. In 2018 the state required school districts to screen for dyslexia. Dr. Nadine Gaab, an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, heard from teachers that they were not trained to screen and did not always know what to do after a positive result. She wanted a screening tool that children can administer themselves and that offers strategies when a child misses a milestone in vocabulary, listening comprehension or phonological awareness. The result was the Boston Children's Hospital Early Literacy Screener, a 15 to 20 minute game. It was piloted in 42 schools in nine states with about 800 kindergarteners or children entering kindergarten, and it was one of eight winners of the 2019 MIT Solve Early Childhood Development program.

In May 2021 the company announced $1.5 million in seed funding in a Business Wire release. The investors were Amplify Capital, Flare Capital Partners and MIT Solve Innovation Future. An earlier round of $1.0 million supported the development of the screening platform at Boston Children's Hospital and a two-year validation study, with philanthropic funding from the Heckscher Foundation for Children, Oak Foundation, Poses Family Foundation, Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation and Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. The new money was meant to support a commercial launch in fall 2021 and further product work.

The company site, earlybirdeducation.com, loads in November 2026. The home page describes EarlyBird as a game-based assessment that screens for potential reading challenges such as dyslexia, developed and scientifically validated at Boston Children's Hospital with faculty at the Florida Center for Reading Research. It credits Nadine Gaab and Yaacov Petscher as researchers, offers EarlyBird for Schools and an at-home option, and says it is used in schools in 20 states.

A banner states that EarlyBird has joined the Imagine Learning family. The page names no age range and no assessment length, and it gives no notice that the product is retired.