Through Kids Write, Haitian students in grades 1 to 4 can grow their literacy skills by reading and writing in their mother-tongue language, Haitian Creole, for 30 to 45 minutes every day. Students use tablets to download and read books from a digital library, and to write their own books. Kids Write provides training and support to these students. The project also shares exemplary student work between schools. To increase access, Kids Write loans equipment to schools and offers them a one year trial to decide whether they want to continue with the program before they start paying for equipment. Parents at participating schools pay a small fee of $6.21 per year. A recent pilot of the program found that it increased reading scores by 0.8 standard deviations, or 10 correct words per minute.
University: College of William & Mary
Keti Klaba: A Safe Place for Girls
Keti Klaba addresses mental health in Nepalese girls through interactive lessons and community service. Led by Nepali university women, and supplied with adaptive kits of lessons and resources, these clubs provide girls with strong role models, incentives to stay in school, and increased social support from peers and community members. Mental health is a sensitive topic in Nepal, so this program will focus on building general social support to avoid the negative impacts of stigma surrounding programs that address mental health. Through interactive lessons and community service, the central goals of the Keti Klaba (Girl’s Clubs) project are to improve the mental health of pre-adolescent girls in Nepal, and to provide an incentive for girls to continue their education. By the first year, the project will establish 2 Keti Klaba in Nepal.
Creating Decodable Readers in Haitian Creole
This project employs local teachers to create and teach reading materials that integrate Haiti’s mother-tongue language and native culture. At its core, it is a software application that enables writers to create books for beginning readers using a systematic phonics approach. Based on customized wordlists for sequential texts that start with the most basic letter-sound patterns and build to more complex ones, the app recommends or discourages words based on the level of reader the teacher is writing for. The books will be stored digitally on a server that students access with laptops. The project has selected Lascahobas, Haiti as its pilot location because several elementary schools there have already received laptops that are going unused. Teachers at three schools will use the app to produce books for a reading intervention program that they will then conduct over the summer. The process of creating books for their own classroom based on sound literacy acquisition principles will make them more capable of using these principles in their own classroom.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
The Recreation House
The Recreation House will be a center for the development of teenagers and orphans in Vidin, Bulgaria. Located in an accessible location near the center of the city, a previously identified facility will be developed as multi-recreational and educational facility open to teenagers throughout the city, providing them with an environment where they have a chance to pursue their dreams and be encouraged in the process. The second aspect of the Recreation House fills a different need in the community. While the teenagers are at school during the day, the plan is to bring in children from the local orphanage and provide them a place 5 days a week where they can work on their developmental skills. Those skills include playing, reading, and writing, so that by the time they are moved on to the next facility at the age of eight, they will have the basic skills everyone should have a right to.
Open Data for Developing Communities
The project’s goal is to create a collaborative platform to promote open data literacy. This platform will provide a curriculum that is focused on making open data more accessible and usable to students, policymakers, civil society organizations, journalists, and researchers. The team will distribute these materials to a network of partners who already have boots on the ground, who can teach the material while also implementing their own mapping projects, and who have a focus on development and developing countries. In addition, the curriculum will be hosted on an interactive online platform offering content, data, tools, and learning materials for public access. A goal of the project is to increase the availability of this data on mobile devices, since their far exceeds that of personal computers in developing countries.