Global Literacy Tablets

Illiteracy is a huge problem in many countries. Using cheap digital technology, the Personal Robots Group is part of the Global Literacy endeavor to develop tablets with educational content and deliver it to children who have no access to school or have such a high teacher-to-student ratio as to be ineffective. The goal is to see whether children playing with these educational apps can learn English by themselves, driven entirely by their curiosity. The results have been extremely promising.

We are developing a system of early literacy apps, games, toys, and robots that will triage how children are learning, diagnose literacy deficits, and deploy dosages of content to encourage app play using a mentoring algorithm that recommends an appropriate activity given a child's progress. Currently, over 200 Android-based tablets have been sent to children around the world; these devices are instrumented to provide a very detailed picture of how kids are using these technologies. We are using this big data to discover usage and learning models that will inform future educational development.