EduCharacter - Skills Challenge

Inspiration

We are parents who are dissatisfied with our approach to education. We started with a simple question: what skills do kids need to succeed? Overwhelmingly, data/evidence points to character skills like empathy, self-control, etc. Unfortunately, schools have a very difficult time “teaching” these skills for a variety of reasons. Character skills are like habits and start to develop early in life – when screens are not recommended. We combine the power of technology to personalize learning without a screen.

What it does

We use a VUI to simulate and facilitate experiences designed to build character skills in an objective, measurable, and scalable way.

How we built it

We are an interdisciplinary team of experts (developmental psychology, behavioral science, education, software development, consumer engagement, etc.). We built it with user (parent and child) feedback and lots of love.

Challenges we ran into

Just because learning is hard doesn’t mean it cannot be fun. Designing content that does both is tricky.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We have several districts/schools (comprising ~80+ schools) interested in not only piloting but also being development partners. We also have active proposals with three branches of the government.

What we learned

Building character skills is very difficult and requires an inter-disciplinary set of capabilities. We’ve also learned that measurement is separate-but-related to learning.

What's next for EduCharacter

We want to change the definition of success for schools from a focus on standardized test scores to a more holistic set of measures. At the risk of oversimplifying, schools focus on teaching academic skills by teachers trained in curriculums and measure success by test scores. We’re hoping to round out schools by helping kids build skills for success beyond the classroom.

Try it out (URL for demosite) www.educharacter.com

Built With

• dynamo
• javascript
• node.js