Blue Brick School
- United States
- Nonprofit
Across the world, 70% of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple sentence by the time they are ten years old (UNESCO et al., 2022). This learning crisis, exacerbated by COVID-19 school closures, has been brewing for decades. Meanwhile, an established body of research suggests that children learn best when they begin learning in their mother tongue (World Bank, 2021). Yet according to the World Bank, nearly 37% of learners in low- and middle-income countries are taught in a language they do not understand. In real terms, that amounts to about 370 million youth who understand and use one of the world's other 7,000+ active languages.
There is little regard for the importance of mother tongue literacy instruction despite evidence that shows once reading fluency is achieved in a first language, learners can readily transfer those literacy skills to a second language (Cummins, 2007). Moreover, the hype to introduce English or other more mainstream languages early, combined with resource constraints and poorly informed language education policies, coalesce to deprive children of local language-learning resources. As stated in the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report (2016), "In many countries, large numbers of children are taught and take tests in languages that they do not speak at home, hindering the early acquisition of critically important reading and writing skills. Their parents may lack literacy skills or familiarity with official languages used in school, which can then reinforce gaps in learning opportunities between minority and majority language groups."
As literacy development is crucial to human development, this education gap for speakers of non-mainstream languages then creates a ripple effect throughout all stages of life, creating a clear disadvantage in accessing continued education, finding meaningful employment, leading a healthy life, and combatting the challenges of poverty and discrimination.
Preliminary research on digital literacy games for young children, such as Feed the Monster and Khan Academy Kids, suggests that e-learning has the potential to improve literacy skills (Koval-Saifi & Plass, 2018; Chary et al., 2019). While such games provide engaging content, most apps are in English (Vaal, Ly, and Levine, 2015) and cannot be freely customized for different language learners. Many require a paid subscription. Further, most e-learning content is available online, but cannot be accessed in offline contexts. If we are to truly reach those in need and help minimize the literacy development gap, we must invest in innovative solutions that promote equity and inclusion.
Blue Brick School's mission is to enable quality e-learning for every child in their native language. Learning variability was a key driver behind Blue Brick School's (BBS) design. We wanted children to have choices while learning, so that they could feel motivated to play and learn based on their individual preferences. By opening up high quality e-learning game creation to educators worldwide, we aim to host an ever expanding library of standards-aligned gamified content.
The BBS platform is currently accessible without cost to both parents and educators. When parents log in, they create individual child accounts so that each child user can play our available Foundational Literacy course, which includes 3 levels, 16 lessons, and over 300 activities. The course was designed by teachers and literacy experts in a way that mirrors a student’s journey through a year of preschool. Each activity takes only a few minutes to play, but together, they gradually build learners’ knowledge and skills related to letter recognition, letter-sounds, vocabulary, listening, writing, speaking, and much more. The full course is currently available in English and Spanish with some content available in Tamil and Sepedi, as well.
When educators login, they can either build activities and books from scratch, or they can browse content in a global library that contains all standards-aligned activities and books. The BBS team created the Foundational Literacy course activities and sourced books from existing digital book platforms (StoryWeaver and BookDash). In the future, we expect live users to publish and add to the collection of activities and books in our platform library.
After browsing the global library, educators select any activity or book to duplicate to their personal library. Next, they open the copy of the activity or book from their ‘My Library’ tab, and proceed to freely edit the activity by customizing graphics, characters, text, and voiceovers. Content can also be translated into new languages.
Apart from building and customizing content, educators can also compile a playlist of activities to create a course. After adding students to make class lists, the teacher can assign each class to take any course of her choice. We also plan to add a feature whereby teachers can control a course's activity sequencing based on student scores. In this way, the course becomes personalized and adaptive. Learners can repeat activities until proficiency is reached, or practice more activities as assigned by their teacher.
Working with international partners in bringing youth and especially educators in countries worldwide access to Blue Brick School through tablet devices or other technology, we endeavor to add many new languages to our course content and to reach those youth who are falling behind because of linguistic accessibility issues and/or are being left out of education systems entirely.
Our platform targets tech-savvy teachers worldwide who have the skills and motivation to create, edit, and use BBS content in their classrooms. In addition, we target children in countries with low literacy rates to play BBS content through e-learning programs. All our activities align with learning standards. Our initial focus is on developing content for preschool through grade 2 learners. As an organization we value research, collaboration, inclusivity, and educational quality.
Literacy sets the foundation for all future learning and mother-tongue language learning is a crucial first step towards tackling low-literacy. BBS is a niche generator of free, high quality content for under-resourced populations with limited access to technology and the internet. Moreover, it is important for children to see themselves represented in what they read and hear. BBS tools enable easy modifications so that minority language learners can see their identities affirmed on screens.
Visions Global Empowerment was founded as a nonprofit in 2003 and formally incorporated in 2008. Over the course of the past 2+ decades, we have successfully invested more than $23 million in education programs for youth affected by poverty, conflict, disability, and discrimination and have positively impacted the lives of more than 55,000 people. We are a team of mostly volunteers who are deeply committed to the ideals of social justice, poverty eradication, sustainability, and the transformative power of education. We have ample experience working in complex environments implementing literacy development initiatives and other efforts to create access to quality education for youth who would otherwise not have such opportunities. In so doing, we have learned a great deal about what works. More importantly, we have learned how to work in challenging environments and with local partners and stakeholders. Visions has always prioritized local leadership and agency, rather than imposing outside ideas or systems.
With our Blue Brick School system having been successfully trialed already amongst children in schools and in after-school centers in both urban and rural contexts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, India, and South Africa, we have a proven solution that holds great potential to benefit countless more children globally, provided we are able to secure the funding and partnerships we need to ramp up.
The Team Lead defines the overall strategic direction of Blue Brick School. This role determines organizational priorities, fundraises, writes grants, plans and manages the organization's operating budget, approves hiring decisions, and liaises with project donors. The Team Lead also leads day-to-day operations, including partnership management for Blue Brick School e-learning programs, and supervises content development. The Team Lead works closely with any technology consultants to decide upon development tasks and priorities. The Team Lead also works closely with any education team members, consultants, or volunteers in creating Blue Brick School content in order to identify technical improvements needed to improve the functionality and user experience of the platform. The Team Lead must also coordinate regularly with any implementing partners to ensure proper management and oversight, to manage quality, and to troubleshoot any issues that may arise.
- Ensure that all children are learning in good educational environments, particularly those affected by poverty or displacement.
- 4. Quality Education
- 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
- 10. Reduced Inequalities
- 17. Partnerships for the Goals
- Pilot
The Blue Brick School platform is at a stage whereby the foundation has been set. We absolutely have further ambitions to develop it, both in terms of various functionalities of the system itself and of the content & learning resources available. We envision adding further tools and templates for teachers to create and share learning content and to manage students; further "rewards" for students to incentivize progress; expansion of language offerings to any language; specific adaptations for creating literacy-learning content for children with disabilities (such as the deaf or the visually impaired); etc. To do so will require further significant investment.
However, the platform is at a stage in which it is essentially ready to launch. We have content available in 4 languages currently - English, Spanish, Tamil, and Sepedi. We continue to add new content in Tamil (Indian) everyday and have plans in the works to adapt much of the Indian Tamil content into Sri Lankan Tamil, as well.
Across Guatemala, Nicaragua, India, and South Africa, we have so far been able to reach and collect data from about 500 children. These trials have deliberately been narrow in scope in order to get qualitative feedback on curriculum and learning resources and to troubleshoot any technical issues that may arise. These trials have been paramount to our ability to improve the system, which will ensure a smoother rollout as we look to new partnerships and next steps. Now 5+ years into this endeavor, we are ready to move on to the next stage of our development and to bring this opportunity to many more communities.
Our goal is simple -- to enable quality e-learning for every child in their native language. We are eager to collaborate with partners who can help invest in our continued development and operations, as well as partners who can help us roll out programs in communities worldwide. With the proper resources and team, we believe we can bring Blue Brick School to virtually any community throughout the globe and be able to make an impact. Our dream is to build our library of content in as many languages as possible, with an emphasis on minority languages, and to then reach those communities that are linguistically not well represented (or not represented at all) within systems of formal education. As such, having partners that share in our ambition to make literacy development content and other learning resources available and accessible in minority languages would be a great asset to us, as well as partners that understand technological hardware and the logistics of utilizing technology in both online and offline settings.
- Financial (e.g. accounting practices, pitching to investors)
- Product / Service Distribution (e.g. delivery, logistics, expanding client base)
- Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)
- Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design)

Executive Director & Co-Founder

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