Education Technology

Sophie Mower of The Centre for Global Equality in the United Kingdom will establish a collaborative program for technology students at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia using expertise and support from a number of other centers in Africa and beyond to provide training and financial resources for them to research and develop their own innovative solutions to local challenges. Students at the university work on creative solutions such as mapping applications particularly in areas of agriculture and health.

Hans Brunner of Value Spring Technology, Inc. in the U.S. will build and test an artificial intelligence (AI) tutor to teach the scientific method and critical thinking skills to individual students at their pace and level. All children learn differently but one-on-one lessons are often prohibitively expensive or unavailable. To address this, in collaboration with two non-profit teaching institutions, they will adapt their AI software for education, and build and train an AI tutor, Ali.

Yen Verhoeven of the Paragon Learning Research Group in the U.S. will create a digital platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and a supportive online community of professionals for kindergarten to sixth grade teachers to transform their teaching practices and bring STEM and 21st century skills to their schools. MOOCs were developed as a means to provide free education to everyone. However, their content is typically restricted to videos and reading with little interactive learning, which is inadequate for teaching life skills such as critical thinking and creativity.

Rimjhim Aggarwal of Arizona State University in the U.S. will use a digital learning platform and teaching network to teach young people how to create 360-degree spherical imagery of field sites that function as virtual field trips to share their experiences about specific UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and better engage and teach others. These virtual field trips can be distributed on the internet, giving a large number of viewers the sense of actually being in the field, and are thus valuable teaching tools. However, they require specialized skills and equipment to create them.

Field testing (Tanzania) for development of tablet-based application for children in low resource environment to learn basic literacy and mathematical skills.