$15M Global Learning XPRIZE :: Two Grand Prize Winners :: KitKitSchool :: onebillion

$15M Global Learning XPRIZE Culminates With Two Grand Prize Winners

XPrize: 05.15.2019

Today, XPRIZE, the global leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, announced two grand prize winners in the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE. The tie between Kitkit School from South Korea and the United States, and onebillion from Kenya and the United Kingdom, was revealed at an awards ceremony hosted at the Google Spruce Goose Hangar in Playa Vista, where supporters and benefactors including Elon Musk, celebrated all five finalist teams for their efforts.

Launched in 2014, the Global Learning XPRIZE challenged innovators around the globe to develop scalable solutions that enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 15 months. After being selected as finalists, five teams received $1M each and went on to field test their education technology solution in Swahili, reaching nearly 3,000 children across 170 villages in Tanzania. To help ensure anyone, anywhere can iterate, improve upon, and deploy the learning solutions in their own community, all five finalists’ software are open source. All five learning programs are currently available in both Swahili and English on GitHub, including instructions on how to localize into other languages.

The competition offered a $10 million grand prize to the team whose solution enabled the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic in the field test. After reviewing the field test data, an independent panel of judges found indiscernible results between the top two performers, and determined two grand prize winners would split the prize purse, receiving $5M each:

@kitkitschool

Kitkit School (Berkeley, United States and Seoul, South Korea) developed a learning program with a game-based core and flexible learning architecture aimed at helping children independently learn, irrespective of their knowledge, skill, and environment.

@onebillion

onebillion (London, United Kingdom and Nairobi, Kenya) merged numeracy content with new literacy material to offer directed learning and creative activities alongside continuous monitoring to respond to different children’s needs.

Currently, more than 250 million children around the world cannot read or write, and according to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, about one in every five children are out school – a figure that has barely changed over the past five years. Compounding on the issue, there is a massive shortage of teachers at the primary and secondary levels, with research showing that the world must recruit 68.8 million teachers to provide every child with primary and secondary education by 2030.  READ MORE >>