XPrize is offering $15 million to build tablet apps that help kids teach themselves.
The goal is to help the 250 million school-age children in the world who can’t read or write. Contestants will build apps that kids can use on their own — because many of these kids don’t have access to the “unscalable” resources of teachers and schools.
The prize all ties into a philosophy known as self-organized learning — where kids learn autonomously by figuring out technology for themselves — that’s popular with the TED crowd. And of course, the other big idea is that contests are a peculiarly effective way of motivating people.
Keller said he anticipated that the winning app would use an artificial intelligence approach to figure out what an individual kid knows and does not know.
A few thoughts:
- The kids (targeted by this effort) cannot read or write. So you need to starting points may be different (speech, images).
- Kids should use these apps on their own. This means the apps need to be engaging and evoke curiosity constantly (the game community can contribute a lot).
- Since there will be no teachers involved, this would encourage peer based learning (and students playing the role as teachers)
- You cannot make any assumptions about what they know or what language they speak.
- The app is supposed to use AI approach. So you need to use AI to mimic a teacher or a self learner or a combination of both.
- To come up with a reasonable solution, you need to understand how kids learn. That, in itself, is a fascinating area of exploration.
- Kids don’t have access to “unscalable” resources (like teachers and schools). That points to tablets with long battery life, solar chargeable or something that requires hand cranked power. This is not actually the app quality but the need of the underlying platform. This also means, schools cannot the platform for distribution of apps or devices. Hopefully that will be a different challenge.
Rural India and countries in Asia and Africa will certainly benefit from the outcomes. No matter which app wins, we will get a lot of great ideas for self-organized learning. That is bound to change education as we know it.