Florida Center for Reading Research

Five Points was asked by the Florida Center of Reading Research, a division of Florida State University, to develop a computer-based assessment program to screen and monitor the progress in reading skills development for children in grades 3-12. This was a short-fused assignment with the goal to deliver a prototype that would validate the concept for an automated reading assessment tool in a limited pilot environment.

Working from a high level description of the function of the proposed application, Five Points designed a solution around an architecture that would easily scale beyond a single prototype desktop deployment. The goal was to implement a self-contained solution that would meet the current requirements, but also be able to handle future needs without imposing unnecessary complexity or extra development effort.

The Five Points team employed a rapid application development strategy to quickly produce the initial prototype application for test and evaluation. The team then worked closely with FCRR staff to incorporate user feedback into successive iterations of the application that added and refined its functionality.

The resulting FCRR reading assessment application integrates all the necessary components, including an ASP.NET website, MS SQL database and engine, and Cassini web server, so that it can be installed on any standalone Windows platform. The application is therefore able to run on non-networked independent workstations, Intranet-based educational labs, and even as a hosted solution over the Internet.