Unstructured Studio's ZubHub

146 million elementary school-going children are enrolled in rural schools in India (Source: U-DISE 15-16). However, most of them are devoid of opportunities to develop creativity, an essential 21st-century skill evaluated in January 2020 by Linkedin.com, among the top 15 skills employers want and advocated by educators worldwide as the most fundamental skill that schools need to cultivate. There are multiple reasons why children are missing these opportunities. Out of the 84% of primary schools in rural areas in India, only 28% have access to computers, and only 9% have the internet. In addition, only 18% of teachers have professional qualifications. This creates inequities in access to creative learning for most students in India. In addition, there is a high cost associated with participating in such learning experiences in the form of STEM kits, subscription-based programs, etc. Finally, there is limited access to advanced tools, frameworks, after-school centers and a heavy reliance on traditional teaching and learning methods in the existing school systems. 

We are developing ZubHub, a free web platform that expands access to low-cost creative learning and collaboration opportunities globally to children in underserved communities. You can think of it like Instagram or YouTube for sharing and collaborating on creative educational projects! On ZubHub, any child anywhere will be able to join, get inspired by our collection of activity ideas and projects, build with low-cost materials and tools available around them, and share their creations with others. No need to buy expensive STEM kits or enroll in subscriptions. Some of the primary features are creator portfolios, community-curated projects, discussion-based collaboration, and monthly workshops. 

ZubHub is a free and open-source platform built using modern and fast web technologies: Django and React Native. It is accessible on the web, and development for mobile devices is a work in progress. It can be made available as a customized version for a school, library, hackerspace, or educational organization and hosted in low or no internet bandwidth locations to create a small virtual hub. These hubs can then be interconnected to form an extensive distributed creative education network. It can also be accessible via WhatsApp / Interactive voice response (IVR) messages.

K-12 students, educators, parents, and local partners (schools and NGOs) in rural and remote parts of India. We currently serve students from lower and middle-income families of five tier-3 cities in western India. Many of them have one shared computing device in their household (such as a mobile phone) and live in zero or low-bandwidth areas. The educators we work with often lack professional qualifications or the necessary resources to facilitate creative learning experiences. 

We develop learning activities in collaboration with local artists, makers, educators, and innovators and conduct monthly workshops (online and offline) through local partnerships to engage children on ZubHub. Through these workshops, we also gauge children's use of the platform and gather their feedback on how we can improve it. We are currently working on a scalable approach for driving engagement on our platform, through an ambassador program for children and a capacity building program for teachers. With ZubHub, we hope to cultivate in children the essential 4C skills of the 21st century: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration. We plan to start soon measuring the percentage of increase in skills in students via MIT and LEGO's framework around assessing creativity.

Our core team consists of three individuals who bring decade-long experience working with mission-driven education-based and cutting-edge technology organizations as designers, developers, educators, and researchers. 

• Srishti Sethi is a Senior Developer Advocate at Wikipedia in San Francisco, USA. She holds a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Rajasthan. Unstructured Studio builds upon her research on designing learning platforms at MIT.

• Suchakra Sharma is a computer scientist and advisor to multiple Silicon Valley startups. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Montreal, Canada, and an M.Tech from the College of Engineering, Pune. He leads the tech and creative side of Unstructured Studio.

• Mihir Pathak is a self-designed learner & passionate educator, working with children and young adults from diverse socio-economic backgrounds for the last seven years. He designs and facilitates unconventional learning experiences immersed in the 4Ps of creative learning (Projects, Peers, Play, and Passion).

Most of our team members grew up in underserved communities in India with limited access to resources. They understand the challenges of the communities that we are currently serving firsthand. For the past seven years, our on-ground team member Mihir Pathak has extensively worked as an educator in these communities with challenging socio-economic circumstances. We organize offline workshops a few times a year to meet our local communities of partners, educators, and learners to gauge their use of our platform and gather their feedback on how we can improve it.

We are at an inflection point where things will move fast with ZubHub to scale it to thousands and thousands of children and educators in India!  

Financial–MIT Solve can help us access funding to develop and evolve ZubHub.

Human Capital–We want to grow our network of organizations doing similar work in this space in other parts of the world. We hope that through Solve, we will discover such organizations, meet/exchange ideas with them and possibly collaborate with them in the future. We have already noticed a few organizations applying in the current round with whom we would want to partner.

Business model–We are currently seeking more feedback on the strategic direction from experts in the social entrepreneurship space to guide our way forward (particularly how to raise funds as a non-profit) and help us keep on track. We look forward to connecting with mentors and coaches through Solve's platform. 

Our solution is innovative and unique as it is:

1. Free, no subscription required - There are solutions (e.g., DIY.org) that serve the learners well in the developed world but they are not available for free use.

2. Available as a customized version for educational organizations (schools, libraries, maker spaces) to build and manage a community around their content, ensuring their varying platform and content needs for creative collaboration get met.

3. Culturally relevant for our target demographics - Learning activities on ZubHub require the use of "low-cost" materials to ensure that everyone can participate. They are developed in multiple languages and address local contexts, cultures, and concerns.

4. Support users in zero or no-bandwidth areas. We are leveraging a unique opportunity of the expansion of internet connectivity to bring equitable access to creative education in these remote areas where otherwise, it is of least priority due to limited resources. ZubHub can be hosted in limited or zero bandwidth locations and eventually be interconnected to form an extensive distributed creative education network. The platform is also accessible via WhatsApp and IVR messages.

We plan to expand the reach of ZubHub to 100,000 learners and educators in the coming year and 1 million by the end of five years worldwide. 

 In addition to increasing the reach and ensuring children get equitable access to ZubHub, our mission is to help children develop essential 4Cs of the 21st-century skills "Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication." and prepare them to become creative and responsible problem-solvers of the future.

 To achieve this impact, we want to focus our efforts in the following areas:

• Make ZubHub available as a customized version for other educational organizations to develop a physical and digital community around their content. 

• Conduct outreach efforts through local partnerships and learning programs (e.g., offline and online workshops, ambassador programs, capacity-building training).

• Empower schools to use Zubhub as part of their curriculum, thus spreading its use and bringing digital equity.

• Developing "low-cost" learning activities with collaboration from local artists/makers/inventors to help educators engage learners on ZubHub and organize workshops.

Our main stakeholders are young learners and educators. We measure our reach by seeing an upward trend in the wideness of the geographical network and the growing number of projects per account and interactions (comments, likes, appreciations, etc.) per project on the ZubHub platform. Another measuring scale method we rely on is getting offline data from our on-ground educator network. We measure their engagement in multiple ways through three primary metrics: number of user accounts, projects per account, and location. This helps us plot secondary metrics such as finding the number of educators and learners in a given area (city/village/country) and their interactions and then plotting them on a geographic map. Comments per project metrics help us understand how frequently users interact with each other and from how far these interactions are happening. 

There is an increase in the 4C skills reported in children we have worked with. We plan to measure the rise in percentage of these skills and also study the impact of these learning experiences on children’s lives using the MIT’s and LEGO Foundation’s creativity assessment frameworks. In the past, we have written extensive reports on the effectiveness of our pilot to conclude and share the next steps with our broader communities: https://unstructured.studio/uploads/2020/09/kriti-program-report.pdf 

Our work revolves around the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten four guiding principles (4Ps) of creative learning - Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. According to these principles, people learn best when engaged in projects they are passionate about, with like-minded peers, in a safe and playful environment. One of our co-founders "Srishti Sethi," spent three years at this Lab developing and researching online learning platforms, and Unstructured Studio builds upon her research. 

The Lifelong Kindergarten research group's work demonstrates that hands-on, open-ended, playful exploration with materials ("tinkering") contributes to richer learning experiences for children. When engaged in tinkering, children continuously revise their goals, explore new pathways, imagine new opportunities, and in this entire process, develop essential 4Cs of the 21st-century learning skills that are so crucial for children to thrive in today's world. Through ZubHub (which is a showcasing and collaboration platform), we aim to supercharge this process and implement it at scale in our target demographics. Efficacy of a web-based collaboration and showcase solution to drive this change has been seen already in platforms like Scratch [https://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Scratch-CACM-final.pdf ], Thingiverse [https://scholars.unh.edu/honors/430/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41265-017-0043-9 ] and Hackaday, wherein remixing, showcasing ideas, and open knowledge sharing have been key factors to driving the creative process. 

In addition, a finding in our pilot program demonstrated that ZubHub has the potential to bring a change in the mindset from "competitive" to "collaborative." There is an increase in the 4C skills reported in children we have worked with. When children have a "creator profile," they feel represented, and it helps with confidence building. We have summarized this observation in our Pilot Project report (Section 3.5). We also plan to measure the rise in the percentage of these 4C skills via the existing creativity assessment frameworks to better inform the impact of our work going forward. 

ZubHub is a web and mobile showcasing and collaboration platform with features such as creator portfolios, community-curated projects, and discussion-based collaboration.

It is developed using React/React Native and manages and stores all data on cloud servers. We can configure the whole application stack to access content from localized storage when needed to support offline use. This is similar to the design of the Kiwix platform (https://www.kiwix.org/en/). The experience is seamless and highly scalable, with hundreds and thousands of children interacting with it simultaneously. We do not store children's private information and encourage them not to share any personally identifiable details. Our application loads fast on both the web and mobile. 

Zubhub also consists of a WhatsApp/SMS and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) based notification system that periodically engages with creators and is particularly helpful in limited connectivity settings. We envision a distributed network of individual ZubHubs that can work independently and share content and data through a robust decentralized social networking protocol (ActivityPub) interface. This is ideal for building robust and reliable creativity networks that can work in various connectivity environments.

As the first step towards diversity, equity, and inclusion, we are building a team that can represent these values. Our first technical contributor is from Nigeria. We hired him at a time; SARS was at its peak. As a small non-profit, we had a few challenges figuring out how to pay him internationally, but we wanted to make a small contribution to the fight against social injustice. 

We truly understand how important and hard it is to build a diverse technical team from scratch. That is why we are participating in Outreachy (https://outreachy.org/), through which up to 3 interns will join our project to develop the software further. We specifically decided to participate in this program as it helps bring people from groups underrepresented in the technology industry where they live. It particularly encourages women, people of color, transgender/genderqueer/non-binary, and people from historically disadvantaged caste or tribes to apply. 

To achieve DEI in the communities we serve - we are making all our resources free and accessible to every child - irrespective of their background, bringing everyone to the same table. One of our platform's cores is collaboration, potentially dismantling the caste-based hierarchical mindset that discourages children from the upper caste from collaborating with the lower class.

Beneficiaries and Impact:

• All children, including those from underserved regions gain equitable access to creative education through ZubHub.

• Schools and educators adopt the use of ZubHub in the classroom as well as after-school centers. They feel empowered to facilitate creative learning experiences using the content on Zubhub. 

• Children develop the essential 4Cs of the 21st century skills and a problem-solving mindset. 

Service and Service Delivery:

• Children and educators use Zubhub. We will reach our beneficiaries by conducting outreach efforts through local partnerships and learning programs (e.g., offline and online workshops, ambassador programs, capacity-building training).

• Educational institutions can use a custom-licensed ZubHub installation to develop a physical and digital community around their content.

Unique Value Proposition:

• Free, no subscription required - There are solutions (e.g., DIY.org) that serve the learners well in the developed world, but they are not available for free use. ZubHub provides equitable access.

• Available as a customized version for educational organizations (schools, libraries, maker spaces) to build and manage a community around their content, ensuring their varying platform and content needs for creative collaboration get met.

• Culturally relevant for our target demographics - Learning activities on ZubHub require the use of "low-cost" materials to ensure that everyone can participate. They are developed in multiple languages and address local contexts, cultures, and concerns.

• Support users in zero or no-bandwidth areas. We are leveraging a unique opportunity of the expansion of internet connectivity to bring equitable access to creative education in these remote areas where otherwise, it is of least priority due to limited resources. ZubHub can be hosted in limited or zero bandwidth locations and eventually be interconnected to form an extensive distributed creative education network. The platform is also accessible via WhatsApp and IVR messages.

Funding/Revenue

• Fundraising via individual donations, philanthropic and charitable organizations aligning with our mission and values. This would be 70% of our revenue.

• Licensing and managing custom installations of the ZubHub platform for educational institutions (e.g., Agastya Foundation, Pratham Foundation, Barefoot College, etc.). This would be 30% of our revenue. We can already see interest from institutions willing to engage in POCs/ custom Zubhub installations. Our requirements, therefore, are squarely around building channel one income now. 

 Resources Needed:

• We want to grow our network of partner organizations doing similar work in this space in other parts of the world. 

• We have a requirement to add software developers to our team to develop Zubhub further.

• We need on-ground volunteers & partners to run learning workshops for children and educators and help lead our overall awareness and outreach efforts.

• Finally, we need educators to help us develop learning activities and assist with community management and content moderation.

We have projected two channels for us to sustain the project beyond 2022. 

* Fundraising via individual donations, philanthropic and charitable organizations aligning with our mission and values. This would be 70% of our revenue.

* Licensing and managing custom installations of the ZubHub platform for educational institutions (e.g., Agastya Foundation, Pratham Foundation, Barefoot College, etc.). This would be 30% of our revenue. 

We can already see interest from institutions willing to engage in POCs/ custom Zubhub installations. Our requirements, therefore, are squarely around building channel one income now. 

We are accepted into the Outreachy program: https://unstructured.studio/blog/zubhub-is-open-source-accepted-by-outreachy/. This program will provide funding for 1 to 3 interns (up to $21000) who will help us develop ZubHub further.

We are also anticipating receiving a $10,000 grant from a big US-based tech organization. And, we are also working with an educational organization that wishes to use the customized version of ZubHub and provide monetary assistance for its development and licensing.