Animated by Love and Learning: A Dream Comes Alive in the Sandbox

In the Cooney Center’s Sandbox for Literacy Innovations, E-Line Media is creating a reading app that aims to helps kids discover the joy of reading. RiSi (Read It, See It) brings digital storybook illustrations to life as children read aloud—encouraging fluency, engagement, and confidence. But the origins of the app trace back to the deeply personal journey of one man.

Over the course of his life, Jon Waterhouse was many things—global explorer, Navy veteran, environmental steward, Native American scholar, and educator. Before any of that, however, Waterhouse was a reader. He had a voracious appetite for books that was partly fueled by his struggles to read as a child.  Those early reading challenges also inspired his vision for RiSi. A key feature of this app is an animated octopus reading buddy who is always ready to provide the sort of help and encouragement that Waterhouse lacked as a child.

Sadly, Waterhouse died unexpectedly in November 2022, before seeing RiSi become a reality. But his wife, photojournalist and writer Mary Marshall-Waterhouse has dedicated herself to bringing RiSi to life.

“He was never read to at home as a child,” Marshall-Waterhouse said of her late husband, whose father’s role in the US Army kept the family moving from place to place and school to school. The constant upheavals contributed to Jon’s lack of early reading support until his fourth-grade teachers discovered his lack of literacy and arranged for tutoring.

“He felt inferior to his classmates. He was angry about it, and that anger stayed with him for a long time,” she recalled. “I think that’s what drove him throughout adulthood to look for solutions so other kids could avoid the same struggles he faced.”

According to E-Line’s vice president of production for mobile games, Jason Everett, “When Mary brought the concept of RiSi to us, we immediately fell in love with the idea of developing a product that could help kids become avid readers and create a lifelong relationship with reading and stories.” 

This past spring, RiSi has been further refined in the Cooney Center’s Sandbox, with the help of literacy experts and the intuitive expertise of kids in co-design sessions. Everett credits the partnership with helping E-Line align their storybooks to different reading levels, incorporate vocabulary learning, and ensure the reading experiences are entertaining and engaging without being distracting. 

Marshall-Waterhouse attended RiSi’s co-design sessions. “It was an amazing experience,” she said. “The folks at the Cooney Center were incredible – as were the kids who participated. They were so focused and detailed with their feedback, which allowed us to really dig deep in understanding how young readers respond to our sweet little book buddy, as well as the overall RiSi experience.”

 

 

“It amazes me when I think of the long road that’s brought RiSi to where we are now”, recalled Marshall-Waterhouse. She met Jon in 2000, when they were both living in Anchorage, Alaska. A few years earlier, he had retired as a chief petty officer after  a 20-year career in the Navy.

“Jon had been an avid reader for many years. I mean, he just devoured books,” she said. “When we got together and I first saw his apartment, I noticed he didn’t have a TV. He had a radio, a desk, a futon for a bed, and books–stacks and stacks of books.”

Waterhouse’s literary taste reflected his itinerant upbringing and his subsequent love of travel and a globe-spanning naval career. He enjoyed experiencing different cultures and reading about adventurers and explorers doing things like mapping the Amazon or trekking across Antarctica.  

Marshall-Waterhouse recalled the day almost two decades ago that her husband first proposed what would become RiSi. “One day, he picked up his iPad and said, `What if a child could read a book on this device with a little character to help, and illustrations would animate and come to life when the child read the accompanying text aloud, activated by voice recognition?” 

Thus began a years-long effort to secure a patent on the idea for RiSi, which the couple finally acquired in 2020. Beyond literacy, Waterhouse, who was part Native American, devoted himself to environmental advocacy. He was active with the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council, a group of 70 tribes and First Nations from the U.S. and Canada dedicated to protecting the health of the river and its watershed, that are so integral to their cultures and livelihoods.

The council’s elders asked Waterhouse to “take the pulse of the river,” which Waterhouse did by organizing a “Healing Journey” canoe expedition along the 2,000-mile river in 2007 with a team of scientists, environmentalists, and nonprofit backers, including the National Geographic Society, which supported Waterhouse as a National Geographic Explorer. The canoes had submerged scientific sensors in tow, capturing and uploading real-time data on everything from temperature and turbidity to nitrates and algal blooms, to create both a map and searchable database of Yukon River health.

The success of the first Healing Journey led to additional river-monitoring trips and cleanup efforts led by Waterhouse, who became the Watershed Council’s executive director. He expanded his mission to help indigenous people around the world use similar technology to gather data on their water and environmental quality.  Waterhouse was also a National Geographic Education Fellow, visiting schools, speaking about environmental stewardship, and working to interest more Native American students in the study of science. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Waterhouse to the Joint Public Advisory Committee working with experts across North America focused on protecting environmental health.

Waterhouse began having health issues in 2021, and his commitment to advocacy and education was unfortunately cut short at the age of 66. But Marshall-Waterhouse is determined to fulfill his vision of helping young readers.

“After Jon’s passing, I knew RiSi needed to be my focus,” said Marshall-Waterhouse. “I knew I had to create this legacy for him.”