I need help from the Racket Community! Our StarShine Planet XPRIZE team is making exciting progress on our Racket-based solution for the Global Learning XPRIZE <http://learning.xprize.org/>. The Foundational Literacy System, or FLS, is our tablet-based app to help kids (and later, adults) get a strong grounding in reading, writing, mathematics, systems thinking, and life skills. We have identified what we call “black swans” of learning, methods of learning that defy credibility until actually seen in practice, and we have begun to implement corresponding software apps in Racket. We are furthest along in reading, and are currently testing/refining the prototype reading app in our kindergarten classroom.
We have opportunities for lots of contributors, and despite having no money now, a way of compensating them — if and when we win the XPRIZE. The XPRIZE makes two awards: $1M to each of five teams that make the finals, and $10M to the one team that performs best on the 18-month field test. Those of us currently on the team have a deep interest in children’s learning and have volunteered our time over the past year. We are anxious to share with Racket developers the work we have done so far, and millions of dollars of our (possible) future winnings. The software will be open-source, as required by XPRIZE rules. Anything that becomes part of FLS will be under the Apache license, per XPRIZE requirement. Anything that is developed for Racket will, of course, be licensed under LGPL, once it becomes part of the Racket distribution. (Although the software will eventually be open-source, for now we’re keeping it within the team, for competitive reasons.) We will contract in writing for software, and pay for it in $X (X-bucks), which will be convertible to real money if and when we win the XPRIZE. We understand that $X are not the same as real $, so we expect to pay more $X than we would pay $US for the same task. Initially, when uncertainty is larger, the conversion rate will be high (we’re thinking 5 to 1), but the rate may fall to 2:1 as we get nearer the prize. Since their are two phases to the XPRIZE, we would deliver 10% (rounding up from 1/11) of the corresponding $US if and when we receive the $1M for becoming a finalist, and the remaining 90% when we win the grand prize. Here’s an example. As part of our reading app we have developed a sound-matching game, using big-bang. Kids love it and it helps them learn the primitive sounds and sound combinations that are a first step in reading. It could be a lot better, however, in several ways. For one, it needs to be less of a resource hog, especially since it will ultimately have to run on a tablet. For another, it needs a greater variety of “rewards” for winning, and some way of showing the learner that they’re making progress. It also needs a way of modeling and assessing the learner’s progress and adapting the content and difficulty of the game to the learner. None of these are rocket science, but they would all make our solution better. Let’s say you’re really sharp and you usually charge $100/hour for your time. Then we might be willing to pay you 500 X-bucks/hour. (We’d rather pay for results than time, but this is to illustrate the principle.) Speaking of tablets, we need the Racket UI ported to Android. We would certainly pay thousands of $X, perhaps tens of thousands of $X, for that result. The Android port is an example of something that would presumably become part of the Racket distribution rather than part of FLS. Another major project would be a reimplementation of our technology platform for reading. We have software that “knows” a lot about sounds and symbols, the relationships between sounds and symbols, the relationship between sounds and English text, and how to display sounds and text on a screen to help kids learn to read. It was only after a phase of trying things out and developing apps that we understood what data structures would power a better, more understandable, more maintainable, and more extensible implementation. The software needs to be rewritten, perhaps as a #lang DSL. At the other end of the scale, I implemented a simple hack to retarget slideshow from a 1028x768 screen to a screen with HD proportions. I would be willing to pay a small number of $X (say, 200) to have that integrated into the Racket distribution. At a similar scale, I need a way to put buttons on a slideshow slide so that the use can move forward or back with on-screen buttons rather than arrow keys. If you already have software to do this, great! I’ll be willing to pay some X-bucks to ensure that it sees the light of day. We have to solve the problem in order to share the funds. Each job will receive an exact amount of promised money, if and when we win. You could possibly get $20,000 (about a year from now) for accomplishments equivalent to an excellent programmer working for 40 hours). And you get to help save the world through literacy. As we move forward, we will have many such projects, first for reading, and then for math, systems thinking, and so on. To learn more, let me know so I can invite you to our GitHub team and you can get access to our evolving solution. If you have any suggestions about how we can make this work better, tell me. Byron —————— Byron Davies, Ph.D. Chief Learner and Director of K-12 Innovation StarShine Planet and StarShine Academy http://starshineplanet.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
