This is a really intriguing project to award large monetary prizes for developing open source educational self-teaching software:
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The United Nations estimates 58 million children from ages 6 to 11 don’t attend school, a number that has remained stubbornly stagnant since the middle of the last decade.
One nonprofit believes it has the solution: Create software so exciting to use that kids will want to teach themselves.
X-Prize is challenging entrepreneurs to develop open-source software that children can use to acquire basic literacy and arithmetic skills on their own.
"It’s based on the supposition, still unproven, that kids can teach themselves how to read and write," says Matt Keller, director of the Global Learning X-Prize.
The five best submissions will receive $1-million each to test their software in 100 villages in an English-speaking part of sub-Saharan Africa. The best of those five will receive a $10-million prize so long as the software improves learning....
"My guess is the team that wins is going to be the team that develops something so sticky, so dynamic, so engaging that kids are enthralled by it," says Mr. Keller. "They’re going to learn in spite of themselves."
