Thanks for all the amazing concept so far. We know you've all been working hard, so to be fair to everyone, we've added two rounds of evaluation. In this round please refresh your memory of the brief and applaud for the concepts that you feel most successfully meet the needs of Affordable Private Schools in extremely affordable ways!
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Guy with a projector
A shared service that brings digital content to schools. A guy with a laptop and digital projector, bringing sharable media to schools.
Resourceful Literacy Learning (RLL)
These cards enable teachers in low-income, low-resource schools to teach literacy skills through active learning games.
Active Murals
Encouraging children towards creative play and active learning – mural-blackboard mash-ups provide an engaging site for customisation.
Infinity paper - affordable, durable and reusable
Paper is a resource that every student needs. By providing a durable, reusable and affordable paper, students and teachers will never have to be without.
Harness the Power of Educators Worldwide!
If crowd sourcing can be used to build a massive Wikipedia, solve math problems, write code for a free operating system, search for extraterrestrial life, etc., why not use it to build an educational system from the ground up?
An Innovation Academy for Kid Entrepreneurs
India is awash in kid entrepreneurs. Help them succeed better using the IDEO HCD toolkit or the Stanford d.school Design Thinking Workshop as a foundational curriculum. Connect them to each other with the internet and used smart-phones. Let them teach other kids by organizing their own TEDx conference.
Roaming books and tools
An entrepreneur could start a business delivering books, low-cost computers with educational programs, board games, playground equipment, and other tools or supplies to affordable private schools in a given area. The schools could rent the tools and equipment for a given period of time.
Similarly to Toms Shoes or the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program - for every book and pen bought in the developed world, send one to a child in a developing countries.
One for One
Similarly to Toms Shoes or the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program - for every book and pen bought in the developed world, send one to a child in a developing countries.
Shared chalkboard posters
Kids love picture books because images bring life to humdrum black and white text. On top of that, images are helpful as learning tools because they are much easier to remember than words. However, many children lack visual stimulation because their schools do not have textbooks or classroom posters. The solution? PosterShare! PosterShare rotates educational posters among schools. The posters are stuck on chalkboards with magnets and serve as temporary classroom posters - imagine different sets to learn fractions, shapes, human anatomy, etc. Since the posters are posted on chalkboards, students can draw and write around them in a non-permanent way. Teachers can switch posters as they move through the curriculum.
Music can be a powerful and tool in helping language learners practice saying letters and words. The Ring + Sing system would deliver curated karaoke content to educators via ringtone and SMS for children to sing and practice their English pronunciation together in the classroom.
Ring + Sing: Mobile Karaoke for English Language Learning
Music can be a powerful and tool in helping language learners practice saying letters and words. The Ring + Sing system would deliver curated karaoke content to educators via ringtone and SMS for children to sing and practice their English pronunciation together in the classroom.
The Mobile Learner
The Mobile Learner makes it easy for students & teachers to create, share, & interact with educational content like books, tutorials, flashcards, & quizzes. The Mobile Learner consists of a re-purposed mobile phone loaded with a free educational software bundle. Content sharing occurs through an online repository (accessible through the cellular network & the Internet), or directly between phones (through memory cards or Bluetooth).
Resourceful Project Catalog
Using recycled materials to create word games, science and art projects .
Great Office Clean-Up
Collect unused or half-used supplies in offices around the world to send to schools.
Story-telling on Wheels
Mobile Puppet Theatre teaches crafts and storytelling while highlighting social issues.
School in a Bag
School in a Bag would be developed into an education tools business that could be split into a material component and a curriculum development component.
F4: Fundamentals for Computer Literacy
Many of the affordable private schools (APS) in Hyderabad have realized the importance in technological education from an early age. In an attempt to fill this need and make their schools more competitive many APS owners have invested in computer labs and even in Internet connection for those labs. The educational foresight, however, tends to stop there, leaving computer labs idle and children still not computer-literate. There are not enough teachers who are computer literate themselves and even those who are, are not trained in how to appropriately utilize computers to advance technological literacy and education as a whole. The concept is therefore to develop a replicable, moderator based computer education curriculum for class 4 through 10.
The Clean Water Trucker
Dirty water kills 5,000 children a day! This is crazy. There are still many opportunities to create simple and affordable solutions to help these children in developing communities. The concept "the Clean Water Trucker" is a water purification system that adapts to the child's lifestyle, school schedule, and creates the potential to learn about dirty water and the solution.
Permanent, sustainable "Teaching Sculptures"
Aligning with the idea of a decentralized classroom, this idea would be to create a multitude of "teaching sculptures" throughout an environment or city. Each sculpture would be reminiscent of demonstrations found in the Exploratorium in San Fran (http://bit.ly/9MKxd6 for an example).
Solar lanterns for those who can't afford them - a new way
For families without electricity, solar lanterns (like the Kiran lanterns by D.Light!) provide a safer, brighter and ultimately cheaper alternative to kerosene lamps. They cost $10 a pop and can pay themselves off in as little as six months in savings on kerosene. But what if families don't have $10, or access to microloans? (http://www.dlightdesign.com/)
Centralized English-language learning
As a model for one of the ways schools could help kids learn English, there could be a service that centralizes expertise in English language teaching and learning that schools could connect to through the internet.
e-Phone
The e-Phone is a variant of the ePod idea (www.educationpod.net) for developing nations. The goal would be to have android smartphones with only learning applications on them and set up loaner libraries, which can be used by students during after school hours. They can play with learning content on the phone, allowing them to experiment with fun learning apps, and also learning to familiarize themselves and explore the technology at the same time.