A post about Defining where we are going and how we will be measuring success. Developing towards and measuring against specific impacts we want to attain.
Today my daughter wants to learn about rockets, makeup and trucks. . . Now what? This post explains how this situation would unfold in the near future, and how this will change the world for underserved children.
Image by: post-apocalyptic research institute via Flickr
The amount of effort in the project is really picking up! This is a chort post to tell you where to find related info.
During May and June we spent a great deal of time in East Africa. Our goal was to work with a group of children that had no access to formal education and did not have access to qualified teachers, and figure out how a self-schooling platform could work in their environments. This is what we found:
Over an intensive 20 day trip in East Africa we spent a great deal deal of time meeting new people, forming strong relationships and the beginnings of some solid partnerships. It was during this time that we decided to host a Design Sprint Hackathon to bring together some of the best EdTech companies, technologists and designers. The event was a great success!
We've been working in Kiberia, a large informal settlement in Nairobi. Here we are working with children who cannot go to school. We are helping these children by finding the best ways we can empower them to be able to teach themselves and for them to teach their friends.
Providing Support
TEDx LMU invited us to speak about our work and open project to help spread our idea worth sharing. Read more here:
Do you want to help a growing community solve one of the biggest challenges/opportunities of our time? Do you want to help provide education to those children in extreme poverty, conflict zones, disaster areas or in regions that restrict open education?
Image By: Jeff Turner
What if we were to offer every single possible lesson from all known curriculums and allow a student to select those which resonate most with their individual learning abilities?
Image by: Brad Ruggles
Have you ever thought of a project that if people would just stop for one second and do the obvious, the world would be a whole lot better for it. Our project is centered in that basic principle! Putting the children first is the only way business should operate in education!
Image by: Brad Ruggles
The Global Learning XPRIZE is an incentive competition that is calling on teams from around the world to build a software platform that can teach children literacy and numeracy, in 18 months, without the help of a teacher. Our project has decided —due to the close similarity to our short term goals— to register for this competition. However this has now caused many folks to ask the question, "How will the competition winnings be distributed if we were to win?"
Image by: Brad Ruggles
Crowdfunding
We ran a crowdfunding campaign on crowdrise for friends, family and supporters of the project.
We are tackling the challenge of teaching the world's marginalized children through radical openness. Asking everyone with the energy and talent, to help educate the world’s children. This open community approach requires us to communicate with a wide range of audiences, all interested in slightly different aspects of what we are doing, hence the open map that we are creating.
Last week Solve For X started to showcase our project as one of those on their site that they want to encourage others to follow and support.
Providing Advice, and Support
Google Solve for X, A Google group that focuses on highlighting audacious 'Moonshot' projects and supports their missions through community building, advice and publicity invited us to speak at their inaugural NYC event and showcased us on their site.
I recently did a short presentation about the Moonshot Education Project, where I touched on the 6 key technologies we are using. I've described these in more detail by writing down a real world example of how I help my daughter learn, and how that translates to some of the things we are doing with the platform.
Image by: Brad Ruggles
We presented our Moonshot idea at one of the first national Solve for X events!
Image by: lorena pajares
Great applications start with amazing user experience, we are looking for UX / UI designers and early childhood pedagogy experts to help us create something simple, intuitive and beautiful for the poorest children.
Providing Skills
From the start we created an open project where anyone with the passion and talent, could contribute to this audacious project. The early stage volunteers included: Bodo Hoenen, Michael Eydman, Natalie, Matt Kenigson, Katie, Vincent Ogutu, James Stanfield, Thibault Sorret, Thierry Karsenti, Stuart Holmes, Sunday, Jeff Bennett, Phaedra de Saint-Rome, Hiroshi E. Shiina, Anthony DiFlorio, Chetan Pinto, Miles Lasater, Dean Thompson, Avron Barr, Michael Sutton, Andrew Cohen, Diana Sharp, Niketan Valapakam, Amita Krautloher, Robert Eckart, Millavi Saidi, Jake Fischer, Tim Young and many others. See full map here
She looks up toward the setting sun. She imagines what life would be like if she could be someone else. She’s never skipped a homework assignment. It’s because She’s never been to school. What can I become, she wonders, are my dreams even possible?