A $15million award competition has just been announced by Xprize aimed at fighting Illiteracy in developing countries. The Global Learning Xprize is a five-year competition inviting teams to develop open source and scalable software designed to let children in developing countries teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic. the $30 million Google Lunar Xprize and the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder Xprize are ongoing in the latest series of Xprize competitions.’
Matt Keller, director of the learning prize and a former leader of the One Laptop Per Child project told Re/Code he thinks the winning app would use an artificial intelligence approach to help figure out what an individual kid knows and does not know.
“With the advent of tablets, we’re at the 1-second mark of understanding what can happen between a child and an intuitive device,” he said. “So can you design software that matches intuitive nature of the hardware.
Xprize Chairman and CEO, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis commented on the need for a “radical approach” to address the issue of illiteracy on a global basis.
“We will never build enough schools or train enough teachers to meet demand, which brings us to a pivotal moment where an alternative, radical approach is needed,” he said. “This open source solution can be iterated upon, scaled and deployed around the world, bringing quality learning experiences to children no matter where they live.”
Teams have been given six months to register and then 18 months to develop their solutions at which time five finalists will be named by a team of judges. $1 million each will be given to the finalists.
Xprize says the registered apps will be tested in the field across a minimum of 100 villages and reach thousands of children in the developing world over the 18-month period. The testing will take place in a country where English is a primary language of instruction. The ultimate winning team will receive the $10M top prize for what Xprize says will be a technology solution that demonstrates the greatest levels of proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic.
