Our Racket-based startup, StarShine Planet, is developing software to help young kids learn reading, math, and systems thinking, while growing into whole, happy, successful human beings. We’re developing apps targeted for Android, which means we're also committed to porting Racket to Android. Our early success with Racket has confirmed our approach — early on in the project, both our reading mentors said that we had already made progress that they had of dreamed of for 10 years or more.
We have a team of computer scientists, system scientists, educators, and domain experts, who have done the preliminary systems analysis and have contributed to our initial prototype. We need Racket programming help to carry us to the next level. Although equity is a possibility, we have another success-based incentive to offer. We are competing for both the Global Learning XPRIZE http://learning.xprize.org <http://learning.xprize.org/> and the Adult Literacy XPRIZE http://adultliteracy.xprize.org <http://adultliteracy.xprize.org/>. The Global Learning XPRIZE offers five finalists $1M each and a grand prize of $15M ($10M from XPRIZE + $5M from another donor if the winning team is woman-led, like ours is). The Adult Literacy XPRIZE offers a $3M grand prize, and a couple of $M in other incentives. XPRIZE judging is based on reading, writing, and arithmetic. We include systems thinking because it supports everything and, in particular, offers the best path to success in writing. We include life skills because that's who we are. In each domain we have done extensive research to identify what we call "black swan" learning methods -- little-known methods that are so powerful and productive that they're hard to believe until you see them work. Instead of automating current "best practices", we are developing support for better-than-best practices. We have an exciting prototype in reading, under continuous refinement in our own K-12 school and ready to be reimplemented. (Since we can’t yet use Android tablets, we’re using a Smartboard in the classroom as a giant tablet.) We have solid ideas in the other domains and have identified domain expert mentors who can guide us to a solution. Although we have no up-front cash to offer, we will set aside a significant part of the XPRIZE reward we collect, for software contributors (at least one-third of the prize for becoming a finalist, and at least 10% of the grand prize), with the distribution dependent on level of contribution to the success of the project (as determined by the fairest, most ethical, and most transparent method we can devise -- with your help). Let me know if you might want to get involved. Byron ————— Byron Davies, Ph.D. byrondav...@starshine.us <mailto:byrondav...@starshine.us> 480.276.4285 Chief Learner and Director of K-12 Innovation StarShine Academy International Schools http://StarShinePlanet.com <http://starshineplanet.com/> and http://StarShineAcademy.org <http://starshineacademy.org/> -- 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.
