Dateline: Austin, Texas – I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY ‘SIDESHOW’. But I’ve noticed something while here on my annual foray to SXSW, that gigantic combination of movies, music and all matters digital (plus growing spin-offs like education, video-gaming, comedy and more) that now pulls almost half-a-million participants into the Texan capital.

I’ve been finding stimulation and satisfaction more in the many small and idiosyncratic showcases than in the central marquee, keynote sessions and events.  

Raucous fanfares have of course accompanied SXSW’s headliner attractions like the world premiere of Stephen Spielberg’s latest blockbuster movie “Ready Player One” … and appearances before packed and overflowing audiences by Bernie Sanders … Mayor Sadiq Khan of London  … Elon Musk of Tesla and outer space … and even – glory be – that epitome of high-tech entertainment, the Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Hearteningly for me, a modest presentation tucked away in a beguiling locale – the Waller Creek Boathouse, right on the shore of Austin’s beautiful Town Lake – offered us a man who was once a giant in his field, who had come to offer us humbly a simple, hopeful new way to give millions of children a better start in life than he himself ever had.

Tennis champion of the 1990s and 2000s Andre Agassi told us “Becoming number one in the world at something came to show me how ill-prepared for anything else in life I was”. His eventual response – after some deeply troubled life-episodes and aberrations – was to create an innovative school for underprivileged and underserved children in his original hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada. It was initially funded by a massive mortgage on his home, but over time the enterprise has led to a span of 30 such schools spread across the nation.

Agassi’s almost desperate thirst for understanding about what contributed to his own early learning difficulties (besides, that is, his monstrous father, whose brutal ways he catalogued so affectingly in his 2009 autobiography “Open”) prompted him to found the Andre Agassi Early Childhood Neuroscience Foundation. That in turn stirred a deep interest in a specific neurobiological learning difficulty, dyslexia. “I don’t know for sure if I myself suffered from dyslexia back then, with everything else that was complicating the picture,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be a bit surprised”.

Agassi was promoting an initiative that he is backing, called Readvolution, which aims to provide universal early screening for dyslexia.

It’s based in large part on work by neuropsychiatrist Dr Fumiko Hoeft, (pictured left, with Agassi) and her fellow neurologists and psychologists at the University of California, San Francisco.

At its practical core – inevitably in these digital days – is an app, designed to screen children for dyslexia at an early enough point in their lives that constructive intervention can then help them overcome it,

Agassi’s corporate partner in this endeavor is a Silicon Valley company, the makers of Square Panda – a phonics-based learning system that employs multi-sensory children’s games.

Square Panda’s CEO, Andy Butler and his wife were able to spend something over $6,000 to test their daughter’s early reading difficulties, and so diagnose her dyslexia – as precursor to having it properly addressed in her early schooling.

Butler of course recognizes that such expenditure is far beyond the reach of most American families with children who have reading difficulties – a barely acknowledged 17% of the entire population. Butler says that for him the main point of the free Readvolution app will be to “democratize dyslexia assessment”.

And for Agassi, “undertaking dyslexia assessment and remediation,” as he describes it, is all part of his general mission of social philanthropy. “Figuring out how to best invest in technology to accomplish societal change is where I like to live.”

South-by-South-West seemed an ideal place for him to explain how he’d been testing Square Panda’s engaging gadgetry at work in his initial school in Las Vegas, reporting on the immediate improvements that he’d seen it help produce for the students.

“I’m very interested in this space,” Agassi added, “because I’ve seen first-hand what a challenge it can be to guide an entire classroom full of kids at the pace that each kid individually deserves.”