Learning Mentors Program

We employ peer-tutoring to rapidly improve literacy and numeracy skills. This solution is cost effective &utilises technology to humanise learning. 

Literacy and numeracy rates are at unacceptable levels in adult populations everywhere. In a place like Australia, they languish at approximately 50%. In less privileged countries, they may be as low as 5%. People who do not have the necessary literacy and numeracy skills are disempowered and are unable to effectively participate politically and economically. In a rapidly changing world, these basic skills are ever more important to use as building blocks for more essential information. 

We have created a peer mentoring program which can be implemented in primary schools, high schools, informal learning settings, and to adult learners. We train mentors within several hours online, then support them to teach literacy and numeracy to their peers. This program has so far been piloted in a primary school in Victoria, and there was an average 30% increase in students’ skills in 6 weeks. Mentors also reported enjoying school more, a qualitative increase in leadership ability, and more confidence in teaching skills.

We are developing an app which facilitates this process. It relies on artificial intelligence to match mentors and mentees, facilitates the training, facilitates the teaching and then evaluates the success of the program. 

Two main reasons:

• 1-It can be deployed in any setting! We are planning to give our application to a school in Turkey which works with displaced Syrian refugees so that they can use it to cheaply educate their students. We also use this app in Public Australian Primary Schools. The program is incredibly versatile.  
• 2-Whereas technology usually replaces human interaction, our app is designed to facilitate human interaction and to humanise education more. We are using artificial intelligence means to match students, and to encourage students to interact with each other and motivate each other. 

- The application is the main way we are scaling the program 

- The artificial intelligence component is really driving the success & uniqueness of this program 

- Technology will enable us to share it with many people around the world 

- Technology will help us share our program with people in emergency settings 

Our main goal over the next 12 months is to complete the creation of the app and to test it in different settings. This will help us modify the program so that it can work in every setting & so that participants can derive maximum value from it.  

The program has been tested and has been successful. The app has not been tested yet. 

1. We would love to use technology to help us scale our Learning Mentors Program to as many areas of the world as possible. We would love to work with non-governmental organisations and educational organisations to increase access to literacy and numeracy education through our program. 

We will initially focus on Jordan, Turkey and Australia, and hope to expand from there! 

2. Financial model: We hope to establish a subscription method (for well off schools) to ensure the financial sustainability of the application. 

We hope to achieve this through partnerships with NGOs, which we have already started establishing. 

We have only used our program so far at one primary school in Victoria, Australia. They benefited immensely from the program and literacy and numeracy rates increased by approximately 30%. 

12 months- 100 students 

3 years (with the support of the Solve Community & with the web app ready): 10,000 students 

We are a team of very passionate young people who thoroughly care about education. We have invested so much time and energy into Happy Brain, and into this program. We will endeavour to ensure that every child gets access to opportunities to achieve their potential and live a happy, fulfilled life. 

Many of our tutors at Happy Brain Education come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and some from refugee backgrounds. We have experienced what our students have been through and this fuels us even more to be part of the solution. 

- Schools which with to use our technology & which can afford to pay will be asked to contribute financially through a subscription model 

- Schools & programs which cannot afford to pay will be permitted to use our technology for free 

We believe that the network & mentoring we would get access to through Solve would accelerate our progress far faster than anything else! The calibre of the people involved in this program is unmatched and will be really useful to us. We want to change the world and be part of establishing universal access to education, and this is exactly the right group of people to talk to about that dream! 

- Financial barriers

- Talent - people who are technologically skilled who will work on the HBE team itself