ARQLEARN

Online courses have made high quality education available to anyone with
a smart device and an internet connection. But many Ugandan children have limited access to both of these, and limited access to school. According to 2016 World Bank data, only 35% of enrolled Ugandan children persist to the last grade of primary. In poor families, school fees often push children out of school. Additionally, domestic work frequently keeps children, especially girls, from attending school consistently.

To solve this problem, we designed a remote offline school that utilizes a chatbot tutor harnessing AI and engaging audio to deliver personalized learning to any student on any phone including a keypad phone aimed at increasing equitable access to remote, offline and interactive STEM learning experiences that help children solve community-specific problems and build resilience. ArqLearn is a chatbot tutor, powered by AI and sitting atop our unique library of structured curriculum content, including 500 hours of audio content covering language arts and math for five different age groups across K-12.  Delivered via a daily radio broadcast, SMS or WhatsApp so all students can access it, ArqLearn will be able to pull text and audio clips from this library, personalized to the learning needs of each individual student. Youth interact with the lessons by listening to the radio and answering questions via real-time SMS. Responses are fed into an online dashboard tracking user participation. Users receive tailored reports on academic performance via text message. Our model distributes education remotely without needing internet! Scaled up, it could provide education to 132 million girls globally who are out of school.

We are building ArqLearn for the 617m school-age children around the world who finish primary school without having attained basic mastery of literacy and numeracy. Even before Covid-19, schools in these countries were struggling to provide students with the quality of education they deserve. Prolonged school closures have exacerbated that problem by 25% or more. Furthermore, many barriers prevent Ugandan youth from accessing education. The first is cost. Although Uganda has Universal Secondary Education in theory, in practice all schools charge school fees and do not allow youth to attend if they haven’t purchased the schoolbooks, uniforms, and other school supplies required. The second barrier is income generation. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), 64% of youth are engaged in employment to support their families. The third reason is there aren’t enough schools or teachers. In rural areas, the nearest school could be a two hour walk! Teachers’ salaries are so low they are forced to teach “full-time” in multiple schools simultaneously, leading to high teacher absenteeism as teachers cannot be in the same school at once. For girls, especially ones from poor families, there are additional hurdles. Poor families need their daughters to help with housework or income-generating activities. Often, a young daughter will be married off in order for the family to receive the financial compensation of her dowry. 40% of Ugandan girls are married before the age of 18 and 10% are married before 15. Only 30% of girls aged 13 to 18 years old are enrolled in high school.

ArqLearn is a chatbot tutor, powered by AI and sitting atop our unique library of structured curriculum content, including 500 hours of audio content covering language arts and math for five different age groups across K-12.  Delivered via SMS or WhatsApp so all students can access it, ArqLearn will be able to pull text and audio clips from this library, personalised to the learning needs of each individual student. We strive to deliver high qualityand interactive STEM lessons to Ugandan children through technologies that the majority have at home: We also incorporate the use of radios and robocalls prior to live lessons on radio. During lessons, the teacher asks questions and assigns at-home experiments that use resources readily available. USSD and the whatsapp chatbot allow learners to interact with the content. All responses feed into an online database, which tracks participation and sends feedback to users via SMS or Whatsapp bot. The combination of chatbot, audio and text is inclusive for low-literacy learners. Participation is also asynchronous: children and their parents use keypad phones to access lesson recordings and respond to lesson prompts at any time. This solution presents an unprecedented opportunity to impact the entire educational landscape in Uganda and beyond.

According to the UNPF and UNICEF, Uganda has approximately 12 million adolescents, 30% of whom are enrolled in school. We aim to reach 65% of them in our pilot, to demonstrate that our model reaches more girls than the current education system does. Although an increase of 5% seems small, that is an additional 301,000 children accessing education. According to the UNPF, 19.6% of adolescents live in families where the head of household has no education, so every additional person with education makes a difference!

Many barriers prevent Ugandan youth from accessing education. The first is cost. Although Uganda has Universal Secondary Education in theory, in practice all schools charge school fees and do not allow youth to attend if they haven’t purchased the schoolbooks, uniforms, and other school supplies required. The second barrier is income generation. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), 64% of youth are engaged in employment to support their families. The third reason is there aren’t enough schools or teachers. In rural areas, the nearest school could be a two hour walk! Teachers’ salaries are so low they are forced to teach “full-time” in multiple schools simultaneously, leading to high teacher absenteeism as teachers cannot be in the same school at once. For girls, especially ones from poor families, there are additional hurdles. Poor families need their daughters to help with housework or income-generating activities. Often, a young daughter will be married off in order for the family to receive the financial compensation of her dowry. 40% of Ugandan girls are married before the age of 18 and 10% are married before 15. Only 30% of girls aged 13 to 18 years old are enrolled in high school.

Radios and simple keypad phones are ubiquitous throughout Uganda, even in remote areas. According to the BBC’s 2019 Media Landscape Report, 87% of Ugandans have a working radio and 74% have one keypad phone in their household. Ugandans pay for school fees, electricity, and most everyday expenses using SMS via USSD. Therefore, this distribution strategy is one that people already use in daily life. Additionally, the radio lessons are only 20 minutes, so they don’t use up valuable working time that girls need to provide for and take care of their families. When youths receive educational content via SMS and the Whatsapp chatbot, they can read it at times that are convenient for their schedule. Ultimately, our mission is to bring equitable education to every child in Uganda by revolutionizing the Ugandan education system. Our team is dedicated to transforming education from a lecture-based, teacher-centered 1950s-style institution dependent on rote memorization, to a project-based student-centered journey focused on learning crucial 21st-century skills through engineering, experimentation, and the real-world application of math and science skills. ArqLearn train high school teachers to make their math and science lessons more engaging, hands-on, and relevant to students' lives through incorporating engineering projects that solve critical problems in their local communities. 

We are enabling rural Ugandan children to remotely attend school using keypad phones and radios. We use a “flipped classroom” model where learners first interact with content individually, then engage in a lesson covering that content. We send educational content to users via robocalls and SMS. The combination of audio and text keeps the model inclusive of low literacy learners (30% of Ugandan women over 15 remain illiterate). We follow up with live lessons distributed remotely via a daily radio broadcast. During the radio lessons, the teacher asks questions and assigns homework. The learner submits answers to questions in real-time via unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) codes, a communication protocol used by GSM cell phones to communicate with the mobile network operator’s computers. Learners submit homework and complete quizzes via USSD as well. All responses feed into an online database, which tracks user participation. This database sends feedback to users via SMS on how many responses they get correct. The educational content is recorded into two local languages for our pilot. The audio files are stored in a database accessed by users through a tollfree number with option menus so they can call in to review specific topics.

In Uganda, secondary education remains inaccessible to most adolescents, especially those in rural and marginalized regions. For girls, early marriage, teenage pregnancy, abuse at school, and school fees keep most girls out of school. According to the World Bank Group, each year of secondary education a girl receives reduces the likelihood of marrying before 18 years old by 5 percentage points! A 2017 World Bank study showed that ending child marriage in Uganda could generate $14 million USD in earnings and productivity. ArqLearn gives girls access to education using resources that their households already possess, requiring no internet or additional cost. We are working to increase equitable access to remote, offline, interactive STEM learning experiences that help children solve community-specific problems and build resilience by delivering high quality, interactive STEM education to Ugandan children through technologies that the majority have at home: radios and keypad phones. We send content via chatbot tutor, powered by AI and sitting atop our unique library of structured curriculum content, including 500 hours of audio content covering language arts and math for five different age groups across K-12.  Delivered via WhatsApp, robocalls and SMS prior to live lessons on radio so all students can access it. During the radio lessons, the teacher asks questions and assigns at-home experiments that use resources readily available.  

Because we are still in the initial stages of the product development and doesn't yet exist on the market. We are still exploring all possibilities before we can go ahead to develop the product considering the cost of development, sustainability, research, consultancy, content development etc.

Our solution is innovative because it provides remote education in low-resource contexts that allows for bilateral interactions between teachers and students, and offers maximum flexibility to learn on their own schedule. The USSD is accessible any time. Radio lessons are repeated several times and available via recordings stored in IVR, providing crucial flexibility for children who often help with farming and household chores. USSD turns a passive listening activity into active learning! USSD also allows us to monitor user engagement. We use platform data submitted via USSD to create data-driven instruction, which makes our platform agile and responsive to student needs. When few students respond correctly to a USSD question, we re-teach that content. When students give feedback via USSD that they can’t find materials for a certain activity, we re-design that activity.

Not only are we the first to provide truly offline remote interactive STEM learning experiences, we also empower children to become the innovators and problem-solvers their communities need. Our lessons instill personal agency in children at an early age and foster lifelong interest in STEM. Yiya’s students have made technologies such as hand sanitizers, gravity-powered reading lights, bicycle-powered phone chargers, and solar food dryers! 

Because we are building the backend design of this platform, we can license it to distribute educational content from other providers, eventually assembling a well-rounded offering that extends beyond STEM. Our model is unique in its affordability: $1 per child per week! Licensing our platform will generate revenue to further decrease costs.  

While most learning solutions are designed for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, only ~25% of people in sub-Saharan Africa have access to these devices. Even for those using feature phones, data costs can be prohibitively expensive. ArqLearn has the capabilities to overcome these challenges as the first AI-powered, learning-focused chatbot that works on any device.

Furthermore, we are a network of schools – not an ed-tech company. We will partner with our school communities during the pilot phase to incorporate student and parent feedback in the design. This will also keep the product's pilot overhead costs low, whilst allowing the chatbot’s recommendation engine to receive enough information to improve. 

Furthermore, our solution presents a huge opportunity to impact the entire educational landscape in not just Uganda but beyond. Most out-of-school Ugandan children are deep in remote areas that have no internet and are hard to physically access, especially during the rainy season. 87% of Ugandans have a working radio and 74% have at least one keypad phone in their household. All Ugandans are familiar with paying for basic services using USSD (real-time SMS) on their phones. So, we will deliver educational content to them via their phones in the same USSD format. Currently, during COVID-19 school closures, the government and many other nonprofits are distributing education via channels like TV, radio, and newspaper supplements. Our innovation is different! Yes, we are using the radio but we are also using USSD so learners can actually interact with the content, and receive feedback on their responses. Those submitted responses feed into an online dashboard so we can monitor user participation and adjust the model flexibly in response to user trends. This model will reach all 12 million adolescent Ugandans, both those who are currently enrolled in school and those who are NOT enrolled in school. In the past decade, USSD has been used to successfully expand mobile financial services and medical expertise to rural, remote populations across Africa. Now we are putting it to use to expand access to education, with a focus on adolescent girls whose educational attainment has a massive impact on their communities and their long-term life outcomes.

Currently serves: 0 users

This year: 500,000 users

In five years: 5,000,000 users

Our impact measure indicators are based on the following;

-Track enrollments, attendance and quality of delivery in every village, scrutinized at monthly management meeting. -Track pod openings against bigger operational roll out plan

-Measuring progression on a lessons/month basis drives internal improvement. -Baseline tests are taken each year to measure progression of 40K children against non-enrolled government school children.

-Track financial performance on monthly and yearly budgets to reduce % of budget funded by philanthropy over time.

-The effectiveness of the platform usability to meet and/or satisfy the user as they interact with the platform.

-Number of beneficiaries including but not limited to paid subscribers, and non-paid subscribers.

-Number of downloads as well as the user traffic on the app

-Positive feedback from users (learners and their parents)

-Potential partnership created to further enhance the platform as well as the scalability potential will be key.

-Awards, grants, revenue will also play a part.

-Number of other products and services offered as a result of the platform for instance later creating a Parent's app where parents are able to analyze child performance on-the-go to help the parents understand the improvement and progress of their child on the go to serve as a tool to help parents understand their child’s academic progress in an extremely easy and efficient way.

4 full time staff

2 part time staff

Our co-founder Mary is an English teacher with a Bachelors of Education from Makerere University and a veteran of the Ugandan school system. She grew up in a rural region with few resources. Her childhood experiences have shaped ArqLearn’s mission. She is an experienced curriculum designer who loves creating learning experiences full of educational games that demonstrate difficult topics in a student-friendly way.

Joseph leads the team as the CEO having been at the helm of Faceyourbook mobile apps and bringing onboard nearly 9 years of experience as a trained educator as well as a hardcore techie. His passion for people and technology makes him oversee ongoing business operations within the company. He is the COO at ArqLearn with a wealth of experience in Project and Product Management. 

Suzan brings significant experience as a full stack developer having built AI-powered products, Blockchain Apps and various web and mobile apps qualifying him as a strong CTO to lead the technical future of ArqLearn. 

The three founders have worked on successful EdTech projects in the past and have the experience and capabilities to drive the product to success. Working on ArqLearn was born out of the need to make quality education easily accessible, affordable and available to every African child - a mission which is a growing success during this pandemic. Our fast-growing traction and daily active users since inception is proof in itself that EdTech in Africa has come to stay."

John Innovations Coordinator and Robo School Project Lead Agnes is a youth innovator and community activist with a degree in Computer Engineering from Makerere University of Science and Technology. They are passionate about using technology to positively transform people’s lives. She has experience as a Tech Educator in robotics and a tutor for embedded systems.

Sarah Okumu is an academic specialist with over 10years experience as an English teacher, schools head teacher, academician, edu researcher and consultant and also owns a couple of schools.

We have zero tolerance to racism, and any form of discrimination whatsoever, whether based on gender, sex orientation, race, color, etc. We respect each and everyone because we believe that we each bring different skills that are needed to take us forward. So we are an open organization that works with everyone who qualifies to work with us whether an albino, male or female of LGBT etc.

We are now in the important position of strategizing how we make this model implementable, scalable and replicable. To do this right, we will need more mentors (such as from the distinguished group affiliated with MIT), advisors, and board members. This would need to be complemented with more successful projects in both developing countries and in the developed world. 

What Covid-19 has taught the world is that there is an underbelly in each society that is often ignored, when countries are encouraged to pursue the liberal economic model. The World Bank and the IMF may have a lot of answers, but their ability to address issues of endemic poverty is quite limited. Covid 19 has shown how whole segments of society especially the learners have been left behind as a result. It is this group that we hope to target and to serve. 

We ideally want help with strategic planning, marketing and communications, as we expand our own vision of what may be possible. We want to build connections with investors and grantors and with experts in the tech field who can help us envision how our project can expand exponentially. We want to explore what other technologies may exist to help us scale up. We also need guidance on how to enhance our branding capability so that the ArqLearn concept can become a household word for every child. Furthermore, ArqLearn;

• requires current philanthropic and monetary support to uplift its operations to recruit the required and needed positions to direct operations;

• requires a supportive network of educational champions and community of peers, collaborators, and experts that could help us in advancing our business model through Solves’ nine-month program;
• team would personally and professionally benefit from the mentorship and strategic advice of Solve and MIT’s networks to better build their capacities in emergency situations;
• would deeply benefit from MIT’s and Solve’s expertise to further develop our user interface which requires a dedicated design and programming effort;
• Solve could also help us develop an impact assessment to advance our monitoring and evaluation framework.

The funding provided by Solve and Solve partners would support us in
further enhancing our products in a timely manner, ensuring we can efficiently compete for learner attention. Additionally, we would be able to access additional avenue to increase awareness of our Solution.

We need partnership support in three important areas:

1. To enhance our technology solution so that it is easily accessible to new users in developing and developed countries. 

2. to have members from the business community review our model to see how it can align more closely with their philanthropic objectives. This may open the door for us to work closely with corporate foundations.

3. To consult with marketing specialists to see how the idea can be disseminated widely in lower income communities in both the Global South and the Global North. We feel that we have a unique and innovative approach to social change but unless we can disseminate it widely our effectiveness as agents for such change will always be limited. This is where our engagement with MIT’s Solve initiative can be critical to our future.

Furthermore, the following are our partnership goals.

• Business model expertise to assess market positioning and partnership strategy to help it scale its hugely-successful model to millions of users;
• Expert recommendations for practical tools and systems, particularly around affordable and functional accounting systems; 
• Strategic marketing support to increase media exposure and build brand recognition; and
• Technical expertise and advice, particularly for user retention and acquisition and technical workflow management.

• Delivery in target geographies
• Content acquisition
• Curriculum enhancement
• Data capturing and analytics support for an offline environment
• Effective company structuring
• Employee onboarding and training
• Effective funding streams

We would like to partner with ArkaSoftwares for the development of app and website and  MIT faculty who can help us think through big data, and how to help rural populations (we are huge fans of D-Lab!!!). Other Solve members using elearning platforms to distribute services to last mile populations who need them most. We would also like to partner with is MIT’s Solve Members or MIT faculty who can provide us with an independent review of our technology model, and how it can be made more user-friendly and accessible to groups in various geographies around the world. We feel that  we are at a breakthrough point now. The right guidance at this stage can advance our initiative dramatically. We would welcome such guidance to include advice on blockchain technology, and how it could interface and advance our current technology. 

We would like to also partner with a company in the for-profit sector that can look at us from a business perspective and advise how we can scale our work in both the Global South and the Global North. Organizations that come to mind are McKinsey Consulting, Accenture, Boston Consulting or similar groups. We feel that we would benefit from a critical business review of our work, and to advise certain strategic approaches that can help us be more effective in the future.

Finally we would like to partner with an advertising or marketing firm that can guide us on effective ways to reach the ultra poor women and girls in remote villages or urban slums who get left out of formal education programs.  Some organizations that come to mind are Ogilvy, Leo Burnett BBDO, McCann,  MOTTO, or Barker. We would be happy to work with any of these agencies.

This prize would enable us to accelerate our services to Ugandan remote areas and admit hundreds of thousands of rural children in our education model.

Online courses have made high quality education available to anyone with a smart device and an internet connection. But many Ugandan children have limited access to both of these, and limited access to school. According to 2016 World Bank data, only 35% of enrolled Ugandan children persist to the last grade of primary. In poor families, school fees often push children out of school. Additionally, domestic work frequently keeps children, especially girls, from attending school consistently.

ArqLearn delivers high quality, interactive STEM lessons to Ugandan children through technologies that the majority have at home: radios and keypad phones. We send content via robocalls and sms prior to live lessons on radio. During lessons, the teacher asks questions and assigns at-home experiments that use resources readily available. USSD allows learners to interact with the content. All responses feed into an online database, which tracks participation and sends feedback to users via SMS. The combination of audio and text is inclusive for low-literacy learners. Participation is also asynchronous: children and their parents use keypad phones to access lesson recordings and respond to lesson prompts at any time. This solution presents an unprecedented opportunity to impact the entire educational landscape in Uganda.

ArqLearn has 3 components: experiential STEM curriculum, flipped classroom mode of instruction, and accessible remote content delivery (via radio, robocalls, SMS, USSD, and IVR). Each component was designed based on research. 

Our curriculum is anchored in experiential learning theory (David Kolb), which states that true learning is created through the transformation of experiences. Research shows that experiential learning helps students engage more meaningfully with content and retain information better, increases motivation, and promotes critical reflection. Findings are especially robust in STEM subjects with underserved students. We use the engineering design process to show young people how to apply science and math concepts to design technologies that solve local community problems. Research shows that the younger a child is when exposed to STEM projects, the more likely they are to pursue a STEM career later in life. We increase learner competencies, appetite for STEM, and scientific curiosity through hands-on projects where students make technologies such as solar food dryers and hand sanitizers!

In a flipped classroom, students engage with content individually before class; then instructional time is spent applying the content. Research shows flipped learning increases student attendance and engagement. We send robocalls and SMS previewing lesson content before each radio lesson, then during the lesson students and parents apply the content together in hands-on activities and games.

According to the BBC, 87% of Ugandan households own radios and 74% have keypad phones. These are the only tools children need to access our program. Our target was 10,000 users in our 3-month pilot. Instead, we had 20,000+! Over 7,000 children respond to lesson questions via USSD during our radio lessons. In our pilot, 75% of users answered 70% of lesson questions correctly. We continue to collect data to evolve our model to be responsive to user needs.

Our solution is innovative because it provides remote education in low-resource contexts that allows for bilateral interactions between teachers and students, and offers maximum flexibility to learn on their own schedule. The USSD is accessible any time. Radio lessons are repeated several times and available via recordings stored in IVR, providing crucial flexibility for children who often help with farming and household chores. USSD turns a passive listening activity into active learning! USSD also allows us to monitor user engagement. We use platform data submitted via USSD to create data-driven instruction, which makes our platform agile and responsive to student needs. When few students respond correctly to a USSD question, we re-teach that content. When students give feedback via USSD that they can’t find materials for a certain activity, we re-design that activity.

Not only are we the first to provide truly offline remote interactive STEM learning experiences, we also empower children to become the innovators and problem-solvers their communities need. Our lessons instill personal agency in children at an early age and foster lifelong interest in STEM. ArqLearn’s students have made technologies such as hand sanitizers, gravity-powered reading lights, bicycle-powered phone chargers, and solar food dryers!  

Because we are building the backend design of this platform, we can license it to distribute educational content from other providers, eventually assembling a well-rounded offering that extends beyond STEM. Our model is unique in its affordability: $1 per child per week! Licensing our platform will generate revenue to further decrease costs.  

Across Africa, refugee settlements are located in rural areas where there is limited access to basic social services and refugee children face barriers to education. To solve this problem, we designed a remote offline school that girls can access using a keypad phone! We send educational content via robocalls and text messages, then follow up by teaching remote lessons via a daily radio broadcast. Youth interact with the lessons by listening to the radio and answering questions via real-time SMS. Responses are feed into an online dashboard tracking user participation. Users receive tailored reports on academic performance via text message. While most learning solutions are designed for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, only ~25% of people in sub-Saharan Africa have access to these devices. Even for those using feature phones, data costs can be prohibitively expensive. ArqLearn has the capabilities to overcome these challenges as the first AI-powered, learning-focused chatbot that works on any device. Our model distributes education remotely without needing internet! Scaled up, it could provide education to 132 million girls globally who are out of school. Therefore, given this prize, it would enable us accelerate our work, and admit hundreds of refugee children into our education model so they can continue with their education. We also provide simple and cheap keypad phones for refugees for communication and accessibility to the content so this grant is very key in helping our turn around the lives of refugee children in Uganda.

Our solution presents a huge opportunity to impact the entire educational landscape in Uganda. Most Ugandan refugee settlements as stated above are deep in remote areas that have no internet and are hard to physically access, especially during the rainy season. 87% of Ugandan refugees have a working radio and 74% have at least one keypad phone in their household. All refugees are familiar with paying for basic services using USSD (real-time SMS) on their phones. So, we will deliver educational content to them via their phones in the same USSD format. Currently, during COVID-19 school closures, the government and many other nonprofits are distributing education via channels like TV, radio, and newspaper supplements. Our innovation is different! Yes, we are using the radio but we are also using USSD so learners can actually interact with the content, and receive feedback on their responses. Those submitted responses feed into an online dashboard so we can monitor user participation and adjust the model flexibly in response to user trends. This model will reach all 12 million adolescent Ugandans, both those who are currently enrolled in school and those who are NOT enrolled in school as well as empower over 300,000 out-of-school refugee children in Uganda . In the past decade, USSD has been used to successfully expand mobile financial services and medical expertise to rural, remote populations across Africa. Now we are putting it to use to expand access to education, with a focus on adolescent girls whose educational attainment has a massive impact on their communities and their long-term life outcomes.

This prize would enable us to accelerate our services to Ugandan remote areas and admit hundreds of thousands of rural children and refugee children in our education model.

Online courses have made high quality education available to anyone with a smart device and an internet connection. But many Ugandan children have limited access to both of these, and limited access to school. According to 2016 World Bank data, only 35% of enrolled Ugandan children persist to the last grade of primary. In poor families, school fees often push children out of school. Additionally, domestic work frequently keeps children, especially girls, from attending school consistently.

ArqLearn delivers high quality, interactive STEM lessons to Ugandan children through technologies that the majority have at home: radios and keypad phones. We send content via robocalls and sms prior to live lessons on radio. During lessons, the teacher asks questions and assigns at-home experiments that use resources readily available. USSD allows learners to interact with the content. All responses feed into an online database, which tracks participation and sends feedback to users via SMS. The combination of audio and text is inclusive for low-literacy learners. Participation is also asynchronous: children and their parents use keypad phones to access lesson recordings and respond to lesson prompts at any time. This solution presents an unprecedented opportunity to impact the entire educational landscape in Uganda.

ArqLearn has 3 components: experiential STEM curriculum, flipped classroom mode of instruction, and accessible remote content delivery (via radio, robocalls, SMS, USSD, and IVR). Each component was designed based on research. 

Our curriculum is anchored in experiential learning theory (David Kolb), which states that true learning is created through the transformation of experiences. Research shows that experiential learning helps students engage more meaningfully with content and retain information better, increases motivation, and promotes critical reflection. Findings are especially robust in STEM subjects with underserved students. We use the engineering design process to show young people how to apply science and math concepts to design technologies that solve local community problems. Research shows that the younger a child is when exposed to STEM projects, the more likely they are to pursue a STEM career later in life. We increase learner competencies, appetite for STEM, and scientific curiosity through hands-on projects where students make technologies such as solar food dryers and hand sanitizers!

In a flipped classroom, students engage with content individually before class; then instructional time is spent applying the content. Research shows flipped learning increases student attendance and engagement. We send robocalls and SMS previewing lesson content before each radio lesson, then during the lesson students and parents apply the content together in hands-on activities and games.

According to the BBC, 87% of Ugandan households own radios and 74% have keypad phones. These are the only tools children need to access our program. Our target was 10,000 users in our 3-month pilot. Instead, we had 20,000+! Over 7,000 children respond to lesson questions via USSD during our radio lessons. In our pilot, 75% of users answered 70% of lesson questions correctly. We continue to collect data to evolve our model to be responsive to user needs.

Our solution is innovative because it provides remote education in low-resource contexts that allows for bilateral interactions between teachers and students, and offers maximum flexibility to learn on their own schedule. The USSD is accessible any time. Radio lessons are repeated several times and available via recordings stored in IVR, providing crucial flexibility for children who often help with farming and household chores. USSD turns a passive listening activity into active learning! USSD also allows us to monitor user engagement. We use platform data submitted via USSD to create data-driven instruction, which makes our platform agile and responsive to student needs. When few students respond correctly to a USSD question, we re-teach that content. When students give feedback via USSD that they can’t find materials for a certain activity, we re-design that activity.

Not only are we the first to provide truly offline remote interactive STEM learning experiences, we also empower children to become the innovators and problem-solvers their communities need. Our lessons instill personal agency in children at an early age and foster lifelong interest in STEM. ArqLearn’s students have made technologies such as hand sanitizers, gravity-powered reading lights, bicycle-powered phone chargers, and solar food dryers!  

Because we are building the backend design of this platform, we can license it to distribute educational content from other providers, eventually assembling a well-rounded offering that extends beyond STEM. Our model is unique in its affordability: $1 per child per week! Licensing our platform will generate revenue to further decrease costs.  

ArqLearn also utilized a chatbot tutor, powered by AI and sitting atop our unique library of structured curriculum content, including 500 hours of audio content covering language arts and math for five different age groups across K-12.  Delivered via SMS or WhatsApp so all students can access it, ArqLearn will be able to pull text and audio clips from this library, personalized to the learning needs of each individual student. This prize helps us acquire the required software and technical staff to drive our education model and empower millions of children not only in Uganda but also across East Africa.

ArqLearn builds on research from interactive radio and text messaging research, as well as on the broader literature on adaptive instruction and teaching at the right level (TARL).  ArqLearn will further contribute to research on learning-focused chatbots. 

We know that audio-based learning has been a vital tool in 2020. UNICEF found that 59% of 129 countries it studied in 2020 were using radio as part of their distance learning response. We also know that text message-based communications can be extremely impactful (Angrist et al 2020). By combining these two elements within a chatbot, in a highly personalised way, ArqLearn will be able to advance our knowledge and understanding of these ubiquitous technologies.

Adaptive instruction, either via software or by grouping students around their readiness for different curriculum concepts rather than age, emerges from the literature as one of the most reliable ways to improve learning outcomes (Evans and Popova 2015).

There are very few chatbots in Africa and Asia that focus on learning, despite a number of successful examples in the world’s most developed markets that have been proven to improve learning outcomes (Winkler, 2018). As a result, research on chatbot technology for low-technology environments is largely missing from international education research (Rodriguez-Segura 2020). 

We will provide researchers with important insights into the efficacy of chatbots as an alternative to face-to-face tutoring, particularly in the most remote and marginalised regions where the need is greatest. 

ArqLearn will also be able to gather learner-generated data. This data can be used to optimise the chatbot’s adaptive learning engine and help teachers to identify children in need of additional attention. Lastly, anonymized data can be shared ethically with our partners and the international research community to gain insights into the strengths and needs of learners.  

ArqLearn also utilized a chatbot tutor, powered by AI and sitting atop our unique library of structured curriculum content, including 500 hours of audio content covering language arts and math for five different age groups across K-12.  Delivered via SMS or WhatsApp so all students can access it, ArqLearn will be able to pull text and audio clips from this library, personalized to the learning needs of each individual student. This prize helps us acquire the required software and technical staff to drive our education model and empower millions of children not only in Uganda but also across East Africa.

ArqLearn builds on research from interactive radio and text messaging research, as well as on the broader literature on adaptive instruction and teaching at the right level (TARL).  ArqLearn will further contribute to research on learning-focused chatbots. 

We know that audio-based learning has been a vital tool in 2020. UNICEF found that 59% of 129 countries it studied in 2020 were using radio as part of their distance learning response. We also know that text message-based communications can be extremely impactful (Angrist et al 2020). By combining these two elements within a chatbot, in a highly personalised way, ArqLearn will be able to advance our knowledge and understanding of these ubiquitous technologies.

Adaptive instruction, either via software or by grouping students around their readiness for different curriculum concepts rather than age, emerges from the literature as one of the most reliable ways to improve learning outcomes (Evans and Popova 2015).

There are very few chatbots in Africa and Asia that focus on learning, despite a number of successful examples in the world’s most developed markets that have been proven to improve learning outcomes (Winkler, 2018). As a result, research on chatbot technology for low-technology environments is largely missing from international education research (Rodriguez-Segura 2020). 

We will provide researchers with important insights into the efficacy of chatbots as an alternative to face-to-face tutoring, particularly in the most remote and marginalised regions where the need is greatest. 

ArqLearn will also be able to gather learner-generated data. This data can be used to optimise the chatbot’s adaptive learning engine and help teachers to identify children in need of additional attention. Lastly, anonymized data can be shared ethically with our partners and the international research community to gain insights into the strengths and needs of learners.