Our app will make an impact on the following focus areas Education, Technology, and more. We are incubating a unique no-cost global EdTech program targeting K-12 that introduces students to a wide variety of techniques and processes through the lens of social impact in both traditional and non-traditional learning spaces.
We design for local educational context and user needs: Technology—both software and hardware—cannot and does not exist in a vacuum. Our proposed solutions will demonstrate an awareness of local constraints and of possible ways to address them, offline solutions such as: providing training for users with limited digital literacy offline solutions for users who lack connectivity, and testing on mobile for users who may not have other devices.
We are partnering with organizations ranging from NGOs to toy companies to make this vision a reality. We are curating the course content via the UN SDGs. Two examples:
1. UN SDG Goal: Global Health and Wellness
Introducing kids to Design Thinking and Teaching Students how to develop Empathetic Conversation Bots (aka 'Nurse Bots') to be used to motivate changes in user behavior (like stress).
2. UN SDG Goal: Life Under Water
Teaching Students Systems how to be wary of Data Bias and how to Integrate Watson Image recognition into Robots/Drones for Plastics sorting.
We have courses planned around themes of Gender Violence, Food Scarcity, Poverty, Clean Energy covering topics ranging from mobile app development, ethics and AI, and data mining.
Technology: Our projects use technology in a way that is innovative, effective, and enabling of entirely new solutions and approaches. It does more than making an organization’s existing work more efficient.
Through the GigaTECHSATX challenge in Austin, David will be integrating HeartMath devices with Watson IOT in order to create an application that generates music strictly through brainwave patterns. The calmer your brain, the more pleasing the music. Imagine something like this for stress management! This application will be then showcased as a module in our first course Global Health and Wellness as described here:
https://w3.ibm.com/developer/programs/resources/cognitive-curriculum/Built for low connectivity: Products developed for low connectivity users are lightweight, work offline, and take advantage of available wifi to sync student and teacher data.
Empowered Partners: Our partnership models leverage the expertise and infrastructure of local organizations to extend the reach of technology products.
The EdTech Team consists of IBM members of in Chappel Hill, North Carolina and Austin, Texas. The team in Chapel Hill will focus on programming with Watson, and the Austin-based IBM lab will focus on Design Thinking. Together our team has the capability to develop and deploy the app by December 2017. Members of the City of Austin will also be a part of the local EdTech Team as well as members from the PFISD school district.
NEEDS TO BE FINISHED
Our proposed app offers accessibility, inclusion, and direct benefit to the technologically under-served communities in Austin through the use of:
Open-source technology: Open-source technology is a public good, enabling others to build on your work and experiment with new applications.
Openly licensed content: Open licenses (e.g., CC-BY) ensure maximum reach by letting users remix, translate, and build on content to make it locally relevant.
Data & experimentation: We have a desire to learn what’s working through rigorous data collection and we are willing to be transparent.
Increase Stage and size of the organization: Ideally, we prefer our group to have some proof of concept and be operating at some scale before we fund. The team would take the prize funds and put it towards further development of curriculum and product design.
