Viki

Many children across the world do not have access to quality stimulating material. Access to books and playing material might be scarce in their community. But, most of the households have access to a smart phone. Our app is made up of a character that guides the child and the parent to explore their immediate neighbourhood. Each discovery made by the child - such as food items in the kitchen, objects in the living room, flora and fauna in the surrounding areas will trigger a learning moment by collecting these on the phone. The child can review these collected items and play games that introduce learning to the child. A discovery app like this can be very powerful since it enhances the child's cognition while creating a social bond between the child and the parent. Parents will feel empowered that they are in charge of the learning.

For children to develop cognitively, they need a variety of learning materials such as books, playing cards, blocks and beads. But the cost of these are prohibitive to most parents in the developing world. Since most parents in the developing world already have access to a smart phone, it would be natural to view the smart phone as a learning device. But typically the child views entertainment videos. Even the apps which the child uses may not have the right pedagogical background. Many of the parents are not literate. The parent might feel hesitant to start any learning program with the child. Studies have shown that when parents and children both participate in the learning, engagement and retention are stronger. Most of the apps are limited the screen and ignore the environment the child lives in. This creates a disconnect in the child's mind and learning stops with the app. The child also ignores the learning that can be obtained from the immediate surroundings. Experts agree that the first learning needs to be in the mother tongue. For a child in the heartland of India, there are not too many apps that target learning in Hindi or other native languages. 

Children, below the age of 5 and their parents, living in developing countries without access to quality learning materials are the primary benefactors of our solution. We already have a rich literacy and numeracy curriculum oriented app that has been field tested for more than 1 year in rural Tanzania and Bangalore. We are taking those learnings and creating an exploratory model for children. Using our app, children can learn more about their surroundings. They will also integrate these with learning by playing games for rhyming, early writing, alphabet recognition and recall, number sense, classification, comparision, measurement, listening, creativity by drawing and decorating

Our solution is an app which can be installed by the parent on their smart phone. There are 2 modes of using the app. When the phone is in portrait mode, it switches to explore mode. In this mode, the camera is on. The child can point the camera to various objects and if there is a match with the objects in the app, it will popup an animation of the object and tell some interesting details about the object. It will also display some associated objects so that the child can try to find those as well. In the landscape mode, the child can look at photos and animations of all the objects spotted. The child can then click on each of them and games will be suggested to the child. For example, if the child had spotted an apple, there may be games that relate to identification of colors (match colors with objects) or literacy (A for Apple) or grouping (group fruits and vegetables separately) or creativity (color the apple). The games will build upon the current level of the child.
In both the modes, the UI is led by an on-screen character which will an alter-ego of the child. The character will prompt the child to explore and along with on-screen and verbal prompts encourage responses from the child. The character will also be present in the interactive mode where it will talk with the child and elicit responses. It will suggest different activities for the child to perform.
The app will not need any internet connection. It has an AI engine which will identify the most common objects.