SMILE: Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment

SMILE helps students study school subject matter, develops higher order learning skills and generates transparent real-time learning analytics.

In order to reinvent teaching and completely transform age-old school systems, a 21st century method bridging pedagogy and technology must be realized. A classroom based on exploration and inquisition--aligned to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's practice of “problem-posing education”--would bring much needed innovation into the classroom. However, implementing student-centric learning is difficult and time consuming. Recent trends of increased class sizes and decreased teacher retention exacerbate the problem. Fortunately, with the advent of low-cost technology and the ubiquity of mobile devices, we can help teachers facilitate inquiry-based learning in a classroom setting, with measurable outcomes through data collection.

21st century jobs require decision making, problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration. Simply memorizing facts for a mandated state exam do not foster 21st century skills. Even students that do well on exams will not have the practical job experience to perform in 21st century jobs. We can only prepare students by infusing the education system with job-relevant digital skills. With our digital skills-based inquiry platform, students are placed at the center of digital learning by being responsible for [1] research, [2] synthesis of information, [3] asking questions about the content, and [4] fielding and responding to their peers. All of this can be done inside a collaborative local network running off a $35 Raspberry Pi base computer.

A benefit of the digital-first mindset is the ability to grow teachers alongside students. While this may be threatening to the status quo of many teachers, teachers will be trained and given an opportunity to promote self-actualized learning with new technological concepts. In addition, with the data collected through the digital platform, school leaders are able to hold teachers and students accountable. The data, in its most basic form, includes the questions themselves, the number of questions created, questions answered, and time spent on each activity.

With artificial intelligence and natural language processing made popular by Amazon Alexa, IBM Watson, and Google Assistant, there are plentiful opportunities for innovation on pain points within education. We have built text-based classifiers based on these “natural language understanding” platforms, helping provide teachers with data-driven results and interventions. The data, once run through our algorithm, can show sentiment, grade level of vocabulary used, spelling mistakes, and classification of higher-order questioning skills. Mapped over time, parents, school leaders, teachers, and students can have a defined metric to measure improvement.

The innovation behind SMILE is our ability to merge the theory of problem-posing education with the practice of implementing digital tools into the classroom. Our solution utilizes technology to help teachers apply an innovative method of teaching which leads to more engagement with students. With the inclusion of technology in the classroom, the process of teaching and learning also catches up to 21st century needs for the teacher and the student.

We use technology to build a backbone of data in order to measure the student’s improvement in literacy over time. We measure the children’s responses for word choice and vocabulary depth and breadth, while our algorithm infers the level of critical thinking. We also measure time spent creating questions and answering questions and rating questions to measure digital literacy improvement. All of these metrics are available on the dashboard to the students, teachers, and administrators.

We are most focused on getting the technology stable in the cloud for all users while also disseminating the software on the Raspberry Pi device. No teacher, already strapped for time, will have the time to use technology that is unstable or broken. We want to make the integration experience seamless for teachers. We understand that teachers want specific functionality from the device, so we’re reaching out to them to help alleviate their test-taking or test-prep pain points.

With the budget, we will focus on continuing to partner with schools and NGOs in the Africa region to build use cases and increase retention within the classroom. We will send team members out into the field to interact and integrate with teachers and administrators on the ground, listening for feedback and using their needs to continually improve the platform and transform the education process.

Our solution will be deployed with a train-the-trainer model. Once we have teachers vetted with experience in the system, they will be able to provide input for other teachers within their school to continue using the software. We will continue having an ear to the ground on the process, providing constant updates, metrics, and inspiration to foster a two-way partnership with our teachers. The communities will access our platform depending on their connectivity, either over the Internet, or using a Raspberry Pi localhost device.

From schools in Ghana to slum communities in India, over 700,000 educators and students have learned to formulate questions that trigger critical thinking with SMILE. Although the educational values of SMILE are welcomed around the world and recognized by the United Nations in 2016, helping teachers to effectively leverage SMILE has not been easy. SMILE requires teachers to stop transmitting information, and instead facilitate student-centered learning as a co-investigator. Such drastic shift is a very difficult task.

Members of our team have improved the teacher training modules and helped enhance the user experience by designing and experimenting various features within SMILE. For example, we had an opportunity to take SMILE to a native community in the Amazon, Brazil, where access to electricity and the internet were limited, and living conditions were deteriorating due to effects of climate change. Acknowledging these challenges, our researcher Stephanie knew implementing SMILE in such circumstances would be a tremendous challenge, but she had bold ideas to find the necessary solutions and the abilities to translate the vision into action.