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Dev4X Moonshot Education Project

Let Every Child Learn. Empowering, self-directed, peer-to-peer learning software.

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Dev4X Moonshot Education Project

Dev4X Moonshot Education Project

Dev4X Moonshot Education Project

Dev4X Moonshot Education Project

Dev4X Moonshot Education Project

Let Every Child Learn. Empowering, self-directed, peer-to-peer learning software.

Let Every Child Learn. Empowering, self-directed, peer-to-peer learning software.

Let Every Child Learn. Empowering, self-directed, peer-to-peer learning software.

Let Every Child Learn. Empowering, self-directed, peer-to-peer learning software.

Bodo Hoenen
Bodo Hoenen
Bodo Hoenen
Bodo Hoenen
1 Campaign |
New York, United States
$9,281 USD 87 backers
37% of $25,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal

Revolutionizing education: self-directed, peer-to-peer learning for 1 billion under-served children around the world

Maybe it’s chronic poverty, maybe it’s hazardous geography. Perhaps conflicts, humanitarian disasters, or gender-stratified societies interfering. Whatever the cause, there are over 50 million children that cannot go to school and hundreds of millions more that cannot get even a basic primary education.

Even with all the sustained work of Governments, NGO's and individuals working to resolve this global challenge, UNESCO reports this problem will not be fully addressed until 2086. That means an additional three generations of children may be left behind!

That’s where your donation comes in. With a pledge of just $25, you can help one of these under-served children – many of them young girls – be empowered to take their learning into their own hands.

“These children need us to solve this well before 2086, they need us to solve this while they are still children, ... and we can!

Our Solution

We are designing a solution that will enable children to develop skills, learn about the world, and foster their creativity and passions by teaching each other. Technology will be their tool, not their teacher. Curiosity will fuel their discovery of curriculum. And sharing, not software, will be what drives their success

Our highly scalable platform operates both online and offline, on low-cost tablets and can be deployed into challenging remote environments to reach the most chronically under-served children. Together with our open philosophy, which allows us to attract the brightest minds, we know we can solve this while these children are still young! 

What we are doing now: Phase Two

In Phase two — which this campaign is funding — we’re putting all the pieces together for the core technology infrastructure, continuing to field test in the East African country of Tanzania, and crowdsource culturally appropriate content.

The Platform:
We are developing a platform that provides children a curated curriculum for early learning: reading, writing and arithmetic. With an open, flexible architecture that is language and curriculum agnostic, our platform will deliver unique and crowdsourced content from local educators and publishers.

The platform will deliver key and unique features designed to foster the children's creativity and passion and empower self-directed and peer-to-peer learning. It will include the analytics process that will drive each child’s recommendation engine, build the foundations of their open learning map, and the initial explorative game interface that inspires these children to learn. Our full roadmap can be found here.

Field tests and pilots: 
Our goal for 2016 is to work with a few thousand children, many of them through our pilot program in Tanzania. Dev4X’s Head of Pedagogy, Natalie Denmeade is in charge of that pilot, and her progress can be followed through a series we are posting on our blog and social pages: this link

 

 

 

Phase two funding and features:

For phase two of our project we are looking to raise over $25000 from interested global citizens like yourself, and following a successful crowdfunding campaign, have that matched by various philanthropists and foundations. These funds allow us to develop and deploy an innovative and impactful educational platform to some of the most underserved children in Tanzania and elsewhere. These are children who want to improve their lives and their futures, and need your help to have that opportunity.

" This crowd-funded approach will send a powerful message that there are people all over the world willing to support a radically different approach to solving this grand challenge! "  - Bodo Hoenen 

The Success of Phase One

In Phase One, we researched best approaches and combined off-the-shelf content with a custom launcher app that tracked the progress of students. With this prototype, we tested how children, given no instructions or guidance, would learn to navigate the device and use the software. All of these children overcame the initial technology literacy hurdle and began learning. This culminated in a successful field test earlier this year in east Africa where we learned a great deal about the best ways to deliver our approach, culturally relevant content and self directed user interface requirements. See more information here.


About Us

We believe we can reach the millions of children who otherwise would not be reached until 2086, within the next 10 years. We can do this through our audacious approach and by embracing the power of community-based open collaboration. 
The Dev4x team is a growing group of over 200 amazing volunteers, advisors and supporters, several PhD’s, neuroscientists, numerous educators, technologists, and designers, with more joining each week. We all believe that the right to have an education should not be limited by poverty, location, or social class and are tierlessly working to make that happen.

See our about us page and an interactive map of our team here.

Our Open Approach in action: 
Having an open approach allows us to attract the brightest minds from around the world. Here are four of our inspirational educators who are supporting this campaign by offering some great perks. You can read more about their work here: Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Sugata Mitra and Salman Khan.


Presenting our project at TEDx

We had the opportunity to present our project at various events like the Google Solve For X event and TEDx. Here is our TEDx talk:


How you can contribute:

Show your support of the Moonshot Education Project by contributing at one or more of these levels and then by sharing this campaign with like-minded people.

$1: Campaigner 

Donate what you can, as little as $1 dollar. Any contribution will send a powerful message that there are people all over the world willing to support a radically different approach to solving this grand challenge!  

$10:
Supporter Package

  • Get credit on our Website, unless you prefer to remain anonymous.

  • Be included in the community mailing list where you can receive exciting updates. 

  • Receive a digital certificate indicating your support for this effort that you can share and use to show your support for this important project.


$25: Early Access Package

  • Receive the previous perks (see above for details).

  • Early beta access to the software (est. June 2016). 







$50: Education Advocacy Package

  • Receive the previous perks (see above for details).

  • Exclusive Dev4X T-Shirt with messages from children to inspire us all to action.






$100: Hole in the Wall Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus:
     
  • A copy of Sugata Mitra’s digital book 'Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning'.

  • A personally signed certificate by Sugata Mitra recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his digital book

$100: Seth Godin Linchpin Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus:

  • Seth Godin’s book 'Linchpin. Are You Indispensable?'.

  • A personally signed certificate by Seth Godin recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his book. 


$100: One World Schoolhouse Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus:

  • Salman Khan’s book 'The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined'.

  • A personally signed certificate by Salman Khan recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his book. 


$100: Creative Schools Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus:

  • Sir Ken Robinson's book: 'Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education'.

  • A personally signed certificate by Sir Ken Robinson recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his book 



$250: Virtual Reality Exploration Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus: 

  • A Dev4X virtual reality viewer to enable your phone to be used as a VR headset and view our 360-degree footage 

  • Get first access to our specialized 360-degree footage and witness the children’s joy they experience when empowered to learn. (See Sample)

$1,000: Community Sponsorship Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, the $250 VR perk, plus:

  • Become a direct sponsor of a group of children. You will receive both recognition via our media and personal progress updates like photos, videos and stories from the children and their community. 

  • Certificate of Community Sponsorship

$2,500: Core Supporter Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, the $250 and $1K perk, plus:

  • Receive recognition as a core supporter on the Dev4X website and on our media. Provide us your company logo or name and we will share with the world how your contribution has helped bring this project forward.

  • Receive a core supporter certificate.


$10,000: Village Sponsorship Package

  • All of the previous perks at $25 and below, the $250, $1K, $5K perk, plus:

  • Receive personalized videos and messages from the children.
     
  • Become a witness. Tag along to one of our deployment locations and observe child learning first hand (Travel, accommodation and insurance not included).


The Impact

Imagine a world where every child has a personally adapted learning platform that can empower them to take control of their learning. A platform that will foster their creativity, ignite their passion, and instill empathy and compassion as they learn with their friends, their community and the world around them. 

What would happen if the 250 million illiterate children in the world, learned to read, write? What about if the millions of children who will never go to school could still learn anything they needed to? What would result if more than 74% of those that started school, graduated instead of dropping out? What about if 60% of the global illiterate weren’t women who make family decisions on spending, nutrition and health, or if the world’s poorest girls were on track to achieve universal primary completion before 2086? What if we could increase average educational attainment of a country’s population by one year to increase annual GDP per capital growth from 2 to 2.5%? What would result if the world’s youth who live in conflict areas could still learn, foster their creativity, ignite their passion, and instill empathy and compassion then become their nations’ leaders of tomorrow?

Measuring Success:
Defining where we are going and how we will be measuring success is important. One of the ways we are doing so is by developing towards and measuring against specific impacts we want to attain. We have created this impact roadmap infographic to illustrate this. For more detail, you can read further here.

Scaling the impact:
This impact does not mean much if it is not easily reproducible and scalable, which is why from the ground up this has been one of the top design guidelines we have implemented. The solution we are developing is designed to be highly scalable and viral in it's growth capacity. Culturally relevant content can be rapidly produced, remixed and translated, allowing it to be deployed into regions current approaches cannot reach.


The Technology we are building

We have a detailed page dedicated to explaining where we are going in addition to a conceptual prototype, which can be viewed here.  below are the highlights.

The overview:

 

The learning map:
In this phase of the project the core implementation of a highly scalable and flexible learning map is being developed. Unlike other similar initiatives we are developing this to be open and available to all, with the goal of providing curriculum and educational specialists a powerful tool test and validate their approaches.


The learning world interface:
In this phase we will also begin building the game layer interface that will engage children and inspire them to explore. An interesting and exciting learning world game layer is a key component that will keep children engaged, learning and continually wanting to come back for more.  


The learning world future:
To help us down this road we have partnered with 
Strangeloop games, the amazing team behind the successfully funded ECO game. As part of our work to build a learning world game engine we are working with this team. Parts of the game world will start to take shape in this phase of the project thanks to your generous contributions.

Here are some of the Images from ECO to illustrate the direction we are moving in for the game world through which children will access learning activities and stealth assessments.

 

 

 




Questions and Answers

Are you a non-profit? Can I write-off my contribution with my taxes?
Yes, Dev4X INCORPORATED is a registered 501(c)(3) charity (EIN 47-2367984). You will receive tax receipts for your donations through the crowdfunding campaign.

Why are you crowdfunding?
We believe the quickest way to tackle this grand challenge is with open collaboration. This crowdfunding campaign is a great way by which we can rally the support of many people from around the world. It is also a way of showcasing our efforts to larger organizations intending to fund this project that there is strong global backing for a radically new and open approach to tackling this challenge. 

What if you raise more money than what is requested here?
This campaign is to raise funds for phase two, additional funds will assist us to move into further phases of the project, and accelerate the impact we can achieve.

How will the money be used, and how can I track the progress?
As an open project, we are transparent with our efforts. You can follow our continued progress via our website blog, on social media and see the real world impact your donation is making. The funds raised in this campaign will go to developing phase two of the platform and working in East Africa. Over the next year, our aim is to deploy to a few thousand children, many of whom will be reached through our pilot in Tanzania being run by our head of pedagogy, Natalie Denmeade. Her progress can be followed through a series we are posting on our blog and social pages which can be followed through this link

Why not raise funds from NGO's and Governments?
We are raising funds from multiple sources, including NGO's and Governments, however, we are purposefully being very cautious because many of these sources are filled with bureaucracy, inefficiency, politics and in many cases corruption. We are staying true to our mission and concentrating on what's most important, the children. This is also why crowdfunding is such a powerful option. In the short term this strategy makes things more difficult but in the long term it's what's going to allow us to succeed where so many others get stuck in politics, protectionism, short term thinking and pandering to the status quo.

How are you different to other initiatives?
Some of the key innovations that are setting us apart are: 

  • Our radically open approach. Developing an open platform with a sustainable long term strategy in place allows us to both rapidly engage the world's expertise but also sustain it with a self-funding business model. 
  • We are building our platform to work both online and offline. Therefore, participation in online collaboration would be offered in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. 
  • Our underlying platform foundation is built on highly scalable architecture and utilizes a dynamic open learning map that allows it to be rapidly extended to any curriculum, language or outcome, and adapted to each child. While there are a few such learning maps, most are based on closed-ended, siloed business models that do not allow them to be interoperable or they are focused on specific domains. We are creating an open version that many can contribute to and anyone can use. It will provide unmatched opportunity to derive meaningful metrics on each step of the children's learning experience across multiple curriculums and learning paths to find what works best for each individual child. Over time, we see it as the goto curriculum resource for any educator to validate what works. This would be the first time such a powerful resource would be available openly. 
  • Dev4x innovations include mesh networking, offline mobile AI and Machine learning, Offline mobile learning management and a data structure that is focused on privacy.

How will you keep children engaged?
The Dev4x open learning map underlies a quest based learning journey that is designed to keep children engaged, and motivated through gamification. Through the use of mesh networking technology, the platform utilizes social tools to facilitate collaborative learning opportunities even when offline, encouraging the children to teach each other.(You can read more about that on our technology page: under mentorship and social learning)

How is Dev4X currently funded?
Our Core team and the over 200 volunteers are currently all non-remunerated. We are currently self-financed and funded to a small degree through individual donations and some grants from foundations like the Shuttleworth Foundation. We are actively raising capital from foundations, high net worth philanthropists, and individuals with the intention to secure funds for the core team and our efforts.

What is the technology vision?
In this phase we will be building the underlying infrastructure to support our long-term vision of the project that includes features like Voice recognition, machine learning and AI support to help guide and empower the children.

More detail and our conceptual prototype can be found here


Other Ways You Can Help

We are a radically open project and we want to encourage any and everyone with the talent and passion to help to join us on this mission. To register to join visit this page and fill in your details.
Looking for more information? Check the project FAQ
Need more information
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Choose your Perk

featured

Early Access Package

$25 USD
Receive the previous perks (see above for details) plus: - Early beta access to the software (est. June 2016).
Estimated Shipping
December 2015
20 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Supporter Package

$10 USD
- Get credit on our Website http://www.dev4x.com to demonstrate your support for this Project, unless you prefer to remain anonymous. - Be included in the community mailing list where you can receive exciting updates. - Receive a digital certificate indicating your support for this effort that you can share and use to show your support for this important project.
Estimated Shipping
December 2015
3 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Education Advocacy Package

$50 USD
Receive the previous perks of (see above for details) plus: - Exclusive Dev4X T-Shirt with a message from children to inspire us all to action.
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
8 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Hole in the Wall Package

$100 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus: - A copy of Sugata Mitra’s digital book 'Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning'. - A personally signed certificate by Sugata Mitra recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his digital book
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
2 out of 100 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

One World Schoolhouse Package

$100 USD
All of the previous perks at $50 and below, plus: - Salman Khan’s book 'The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined'. - A personally signed certificate by Salman Khan recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his book.
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
3 out of 100 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

Seth Godin Linchpin Package

$100 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus: - Seth Godin’s book 'Linchpin. Are You Indispensable?'. - A personally signed certificate by Seth Godin recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his book.
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
3 out of 100 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

Creative Schools Package

$100 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus: - Sir Ken Robinson's book: 'Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education'. - A personally signed certificate by Sir Ken Robinson recognizing your contribution, to accompany a copy of his book.
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
9 out of 100 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

Virtual Reality Exploration

$250 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, plus: - A Dev4X virtual reality viewer to enable your phone to be used as a VR headset and view our 360-degree footage - Get first access to our specialized 360-degree footage and witness the children’s joy they experience when empowered to learn.
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
1 out of 100 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

Community Sponsorship Package

$1,000 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, the $250 VR perk, plus: - Become a direct sponsor of a group of children. You will receive both recognition via our media and personal progress updates like photos, videos and stories from the children and their community. - Certificate of Community Sponsorship
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Core Supporter Package

$2,500 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, the $250 and $1K perk, plus: - Receive recognition as a core supporter on the Dev4X website and on our media. Provide us your company logo or name and we will share with the world how your contribution has helped bring this project forward. - Receive a core supporter certificate.
Estimated Shipping
January 2016
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Village Sponsorship Package

$10,000 USD
All of the previous perks at $25 and below, the $250, $1K, $2K perk, plus: - Receive personalized videos, gifts and messages from the children. - Become a witness. Tag along to one of our field test locations and observe child learning first hand (Travel and insurance not included).
Estimated Shipping
September 2016
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

No strings package

$25,000 USD
A perk for individuals, foundations and organizations that just want to contribute. However, if you wish you can get any and all the rewards or give them to someone else.
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

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