The Problem

250 million children around the world cannot read, write, or demonstrate basic arithmetic skills.





UNESCO has estimated that the world will need 1.6 million more teachers globally to tackle the literacy rate, and the number is set to double by 2030.

Enter Elon Musk

Musk is known for being the face of such organizations as Tesla and SpaceX. He is also the co-chairman of the AI research company OpenAI and the CEO of neurotechnology company Neuralink, among other companies that he is involved with.

Elon Musk provided $15 million to the Global Learning XPRIZE. The goal is to develop methods to teach the 250 million children who do not have access to primary or secondary education the means to teach themselves to read, write, and do math within 15 months.

XPRIZE

XPrize is an innovation engine and a facilitator of exponential change. They transform how people think about the world's biggest problems and incentivise their solutions.

XPRIZE announced the five finalists who developed Open Source and cutting-edge learning software, advancing in the Global Learning XPRIZE. Each finalist was awarded $1M milestone prize. The five finalist teams will begin field testing their education technology solutions this November in Tanzania.

The 5 Finalists

Universal access to education is a major priority for XPRIZE, and we are proud to celebrate the change-making teams making impressive strides to ensure every single child has the opportunity to take learning into her own hands. The leading solutions born from this competition could provide the key to unlocking literacy for children most in need, giving them access to an education they otherwise wouldn’t have.

- Marcus Shingles, CEO of XPRIZE Foundation

• CCI (New York, United States) is developing structured and sequential instructional programs, in addition to a platform seeking to enable non-coders to develop engaging learning content in any language or subject area.
  
  
• Chimple (Bangalore, India) is developing a learning platform aimed at enabling children to learn reading, writing and mathematics on a tablet through more than 60 explorative games and 70 different stories.
  
  
• Kitkit School (Berkeley, United States) is developing a learning program with a game-based core and flexible learning architecture aimed at helping children independently learn, irrespective of their knowledge, skill, and environment.
  
  
• onebillion (UK/Malawi/Tanzania) is merging numeracy content with new literacy material to offer directed learning and creative activities alongside continuous monitoring to respond to different children’s needs.
  
  
• RoboTutor (Pittsburgh, United States) is leveraging Carnegie Mellon's research in reading and math tutors, speech recognition and synthesis, machine learning, educational data mining, cognitive psychology, and human-computer interaction.

Final Competition

To field-test the five finalists’ solutions, the Global Learning XPRIZE partnered with UNESCO, the World Food Programme (WFP), and the Government of Tanzania. Approximately 4,000 children in 150 villages in the Tanga region of Tanzania will use 8,000 Pixel C tablets donated by Google to test the top software solutions for approximately 15 months.

At the end of the field testing phase, the team whose solution enables the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic will receive the Grand Prize of $10 million, to be announced in April 2019. Each of the five finalists will be required to open source both their code and their content which will be free and available for anyone to build on.

Visit: XPRIZE to checkout other projects that will make a difference tomorrow.
Further Reading: Forbes