A team from Bangalore has made it to one of the five finalist positions in Global Learning XPRIZE competition.

XPRIZE, the global leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, announced the five finalists advancing in the USD 15M Global Learning XPRIZE which includes Chimple, a team from Bangalore.

Each of the five finalists were awarded with a USD 1 million milestone prize. Chimple is developing a learning platform aimed at enabling children to learn reading, writing, and mathematics on a tablet.

The five finalist teams will begin field testing their education technology solutions this November in Tanzania.

What is the XPRIZE?
XPRIZE is a highly leveraged, incentivized prize competition that pushes the limits of what’s possible to change the world for the better.

It captures the world’s imagination and inspires others to reach for similar goals, spurring innovation and accelerating the rate of positive change.
Teams will compete in a multi-stage competition that tests for specific criteria:

– You must have ability to measurably increase the learning of children with limited access to schooling within the18-month field-testing period
– Your creation or design should be easy to use and engaging for children, so they can operate it alone and/or in self-organized groups
– You must be able to create open source software that makes marked improvements to existing technology

The finalist teams

1. Chimple (Bangalore, India) is developing a learning platform and their aim is to enable children to read, write, and practice mathematics on a tablet through more than 60 explorative games.

2. Kitkit School (Berkeley, United States) is developing a learning programme which will have a game-based core and flexible learning architecture. The aim is to help children who can learn independently, irrespective of their knowledge and skills.

3. Onebillion (UK/Malawi/Tanzania) is merging numeracy content with new literacy material. Its aim is to offer directed learning and creative activities alongside continuous monitoring to respond to different children’s needs.

4. Robo Tutor (Pittsburgh, United States) is taking advantage from Carnegie Mellon’s research in reading and math tutors, speech recognition and synthesis, machine learning, educational data mining, cognitive psychology, and human-computer interaction.

5. CCI (New York, United States) is developing structured and sequential instructional programmes to enable non-coders to develop engaging learning content in different language or area.

What is the main purpose of XPRIZE?

“Universal access to education is a major priority for XPRIZE, and we are proud to celebrate the change-making teams making impressive strides to ensure every single child has the opportunity to take learning into her own hands,” said Marcus Shingles, CEO of XPRIZE Foundation, as per the official website.

How XPRIZE is furthering education

The Global Learning XPRIZE will help prove that with the right resources, children can teach themselves to read, write and do arithmetic. By ensuring each finalist’s solutions are open source, XPRIZE also aims to increase solutions worldwide at the intersection of technology and learning.

“As we move to the final field testing phase, we are one step closer to scaling transformative technology solutions that foster child-driven learning and provide a world-class education for all”, said Matt Keller, senior director of the Global Learning XPRIZE.

Around 4,000 children in 150 villages in the Tanga region of Tanzania will use 8,000 Pixel C tablets donated by Google to test the top software solutions for approximately 15 months.