Early literacy in rural areas

Bangladesh has one of the lowest literacy rates in Asia and education is key to economic development. The problem is chicken-and-egg: disadvantaged areas lack qualified teachers, children receive poor education, and the next generation of teachers also lacks qualifications.

The solution is a highly engaging and innovative educational toy for use in schools and homes to teach children aged 3-7 to read, write, and count. It is self-contained and does not require human intervention. It comprises puzzle games with letters and numbers and an artificial intelligence that teaches children decoding strategies and reading. It also works for adults and parents can learn to read with their children. We have a patent pending for this invention.

At scale, the solution would improve equality of opportunity for millions of children who lack good teachers, deliver on the sustainable development goal of quality education for all, and raise literacy rates for all ages.

Children learn reading, writing, and basic math with considerable human involvement: about one year of contact time with a qualified teacher. This educational model works and has been proven for hundreds of years. But it is slow and would require decades or centuries to work in a country like Bangladesh, where around three fourths of the population is rural and the literacy rate is among the lowest in Asia.

A comprehensive review of the literature found that early childhood interventions have very high returns of 7-10% per year (Elango et al. 2015). This result implies that the lack of good early childhood interventions will leave children from disadvantaged areas lagging significantly behind. Without cost-effective access to education, over 5 million children in rural areas (around 8 million are in the 3-7 age group, and 73 percent are rural) will miss on the opportunity of a getting out of poverty, because education is the main determinant of income. Poor education and poverty is transmitted to their own children and millions of families will endure a cycle of poor education and poverty.

We are working with pre-school children in western countries committed to early childhood education, such as France, and in emerging countries, such as Mozambique. France has made kindergarten mandatory from age 3 to combat the early literacy gap and we see our solution as part of that mission. We target public schools in under-served and disadvantaged areas that teachers with higher ratings would rather avoid. We use the proceeds from these areas to subsidise operations in emerging countries, for example Bangladesh as in this challenge.

In addition to the main focus on education, this proposal address other aspects of the challenge too. The toy can be manufactured in Bangladesh to create jobs, to provide skills, and to involve the local community in the solution to get buy-in from the community. The toy will require high-skill workers such as linguists, education experts, and software developers. And starting operations in Bangladesh will put it at the forefront of innovation in education: the future of education is written in code and our venture will help write it.

The solution is a self-contained system to teach 3-6 year old children reading, writing and maths without human intervention. It consists of a physical aspect and a software aspect. The physical aspect is similar to the game of shapes with triangles, squares, and circles where children have to fit the right letter in the right slot; the difference is that it consists of a wooden board with letters that spell the child's name (their favorite word), children play the puzzle of finding the letters that go in the right slots, and the plastic letters on wood form a nice result (unlike the game of shapes, the letters stay and do not fall through). It also has individual letters for children to form any word, numbers to learn to count, and math symbols to learn arithmetic. Children learn the shapes of letters from repetition in the sheer amount of times they play with them.

The software aspect consists of an artificial intelligence that teaches children reading, writing, and maths. It is embedded in a server box with a camera, a screen, a microphone, speakers, and buttons. Children can speak into the microphone and a speech recognition system recognises the word and shows its spelling on the screen. Children can learn new words prompted by their curiosity and at their own pace.

The software can also pronounce any word that children form with the letter blocks. Upon forming a new word, children place the word under the camera, press a button, and the software recognizes the word with Optical Character Recognition and pronounces it with speech synthesis, so children learn to explore the language at their own pace. Depending on the ability and progress of the child, the software teaches decoding strategies by sounding the relevant spelling rule. For example, in English, "EA" often makes the [i] sound (the closed, front, unrounded vowel) as in "TEA" and "EAT", but sometimes it makes another sound (the open-mid, front, unrounded vowel) as in "tearing apart". Bengali uses the principle of the alphabet and is suitable for this invention.

We did extensive testing and the physical part is now feature-complete. We have filed a patent for this invention: https://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum... .

The toy innovates by merging a physical toy appropriate for young children with the flexibility of software to teach them literacy. Many tablet applications that help with literacy are all-digital and unsuitable for very young children.

The dual physical and virtual aspects allow children to play with a physical toy that evolves with them. For example, the toy teaches decoding strategies to children appropriate for their age and previous experience, so children are always learning new strategies. Children can explore the language, e.g. they can use the wooden and plastic blocks to form a word that does not exist, such as "wugs", press a button on the server box, and an artificial intelligence synthesizes the pronunciation of that word from having digested a phonetic dictionary of the language. To play with words, the artificial intelligence proposes new words from the letters: for example, if children form "nod", the system proposes "node" with a new letter or "done" with a new letter and a rearrangement of letters in increasing complexity. To teach maths, children can form equations such as "1+1=2" and the system provides feedback on whether it is correct.

We made many improvements based on children's feedback. For example, in English we learned that some letters like the S need to be symmetric to avoid frustration. Our extensive testing leads us to believe that the physical part of the toy is now feature-complete and we have applied for a patent.

We are currently at the prototype stage. While it may sound early to apply for the Tiger Challenge, we see our solution and mission to be so aligned with the challenge of quality education for disadvantaged areas that we decided it was too good to miss. Therefore, our belief that the solution addresses the problem is based on preliminary results from our experience.

The main results stem from experience with children who started playing with the device when they were two years old. After one year they had taught themselves to read and write their own names. After two years, they can read and write all names in the extended family. They have learnt to recognise all letters of the alphabet, they know the correspondence of case between capital and lowercase letters, they can read and write all names in the extended family, they recognize all numbers, and they haven't even started compulsory education. After two and a half years, they still enjoy playing with the toy.

We believe that children could use this system to learn fast and learn well because they are learning at their own pace, from their own natural curiosity, and with a system that evolves with them. By repeatedly playing with the letters, they memorize their shape and are naturally inclined to copy them with a pen, teaching themselves to write. We have got a lot of interest from parents who like the toy and want their children to learn while having fun.

We are currently serving 20 children. In one year, we will be serving 150 children for the pilot with 5 kindergartens. In five years, we will be serving at least 20% of the children in one geographic area, where 20% is a target for the schools from disadvantaged backgrounds and the geographic area could be the province of Québec, the New York City public school system, or a significant number of children in Bangladesh in partnership with BRAC (the world's largest NGO and a partner of Simprints, I company I previously worked for).

Over the next year we want to pilot a project in 5 schools with 150 children total, incorporate the lessons from the pilot into the randomised control trial (performed by external academic partners) over two years to gauge the effectiveness of the solution, and use the results from the trial to sell to the large organisations we want to reach in 5 years.

Over the next year, the main barriers are the market fit and finding a set of ideal clients to make the business sustainable; and recruitment of a larger team to scale the business (which has been a one-person team for two years). Over the next five years, the main barrier is being ready for the randomised control trial because early childhood education takes several years to show results, so the trial must be ready by year 2 if we want results by the start of year 5.

Regarding the ideal client, I am using a business coach with a track record in making early startups successful and making million-dollar sales. Regarding team recruitment, I feel confident that exposure at the Tiger Challenge will provide the opportunities to meet talented people committed to the same vision of quality education for all. Regarding the randomised control trial, I have a network of researchers from my previous career in academia who specialise in early childhood education and a list of several grant bodies with programs to fund rigorous evaluation of innovative solutions in early childhood education, such as the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK, which also offers support in taking positive approaches to the national level.

Bangladesh has the advantage of following the principle of the alphabet and of being an attractive manufacturing location. The market opportunity consists of trialling a model of a micro-franchise with digital tuition centres similar to Slate2Learn. (Unlike Slate2Learn, which requires that children already be able to read in order to use the tablet, our solution starts as early as 3 years of age.) The micro-franchise consists of local entrepreneurs acquiring our toy and making it available to the community for a fee; parents can invest in their young children's education without the excessive cost of private schooling; and entrepreneurs can pay back the toy by installments.

One person (founder and CEO), working on this solution full-time at the moment (and on spare time for the last 2 years) and contractors (a patent attorney, a typeface designer, and a sales coach).

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique (France) and a PhD in Economics from Columbia University. I did a post-doc in Economics at the University of Cambridge focused on early childhood education and another post-doc in software engineering and artificial intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute. I am passionate about children's education and have invented several toys, devices, and games. I also enjoy digital fabrication with graphic design and computer-assisted manufacturing. I am committed to open-source software (see my Github repositories at github.com/miguelmorin and my contributions on StackExchange @mmorin) and decided to file a patent for the sustainability of the business. I am also passionate about languages (speaking fluently Portuguese, French, English, Spanish, and having passing knowledge of German).

We currently use the services of Google Cloud Platform for speech recognition and speech synthesis with automated queries to their Application Programming Interface. We will develop our own system that can work without an internet connection.

In the early years, the key customers are middle-income parents who can afford a subscription to a digital tuition centre in the micro-franchise. The unique selling proposition is high-quality and low-cost early childhood education with very high returns.

Later on, the key customers are governments or NGOs sensitive to early childhood education and social inequality, such as BRAC. The unique selling proposition is high-quality and low-cost early childhood education adapted to limited budgets and can be deployed where high-quality teachers would rather not go.

We have personal savings to cover two years of operation and are also applying for grants for the early years. Financial sustainability afterwards will be from customer revenue, which is the best way to stay in business.

I have spent 10 years in academia, where thinking is narrowly defined, delimited with specific steps, and mostly negative in the sense that people shoot down ideas to see which ones survive. I would benefit from interacting with creative thinkers, optimists, and courageous creators who are not afraid to take on challenges. I have made big leaps in my solution thanks to feedback from other people. I also expect to benefit from the Tiger IT foundation's local expertise to accelerate the reach of my social mission and to find a sustainable business model that works in emerging countries like Bangladesh. And after 10 years in academia and post-doc positions, my savings can give 1-2 years of runway working alone, so I would greatly benefit from the awards, as it would be a shame to work hard on a business that is promising but is lacking funding.

I would like to partner with organizations that have expertise in running early childhood interventions or that have an established reach to 3-7 year old children.