Chalk: E-Learning For K-12 STEM Education

Chalk is an e-learning website for k-12 STEM education. It is a platform for writing articles and quizzes that engage students using narrative, humour, imagery and gamification. Built to be mobile friendly and free, we want to help disadvantaged students get the best start in life.

Young people living in disadvantage often struggle with less access to books, learning materials and teachers that form the foundation of learning.

Furthermore, to find employment in the workplace of the future, students need to develop greater skills in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) than ever before.

This is the problem that we are attempting to solve. We believe that free online education should be available to everyone to make education equitable and break the cycle of disadvantage.

Chalk is an e-learning website that addresses this need by: 

• Providing a platform for the creation of engaging articles that explain concepts taught in STEM. These articles are both crowd-sourced from a global community of educators and developed in-house.

• Ranking articles using a voting system to surface the best content and help refine future content.

• Development of a teaching methodology that uses narrative, humour, purpose, informal language, succinctness and imagery to create the best explanations.

• Providing the content on a mobile optimised website that can be accessed by students with low speed connections on smart phones and tablets.

• Incorporating gamification to motivate students when learning difficult topics.

At scale, Chalk will take the explanations that teachers use in their classrooms every day across the planet and make them available in one place for everybody.

Today 75 percent of the fastest growing occupations require STEM skills. These subjects are difficult for low socioeconomic youth who struggle with less access to schools and resources. 

This makes the quality of education an even stronger determinant of future prosperity. Those who can afford it will do well, those who can't will fall further behind.

Free online education is a key solution to this problem. However, it needs to be improved in the following ways: 

• Content needs to be easier to learn, more engaging and optimised for mobile devices. 
• More content is required to fully cover a growing curriculum.

Chalk aims to solve these problems by: 

• Making better use of the science of teaching (pedagogy) to create content that is fun and easier to learn.
• Providing content that is highly optimised for mobile devices so it can be accessed by students on slow networks with data restrictions.
• Utilise the global pool of educator talent by crowd-sourcing content.
• Employing a voting system to learn what works and feed this back into future content.
• Use gamification to engage students and keep them motivated.

The solution is tailored to students learning K-12 STEM subjects. The impact will be better learning outcomes for students using the platform as measured by metrics and online surveys. 

The target outcomes will be: 

1. To scale up the number of articles covering concepts in STEM subjects. Content will initially be developed in-house along with refinement of a teaching methodology used as a guide for crowd-sourced articles. 
2. Development of quizzes and gamification mechanics that make the platform more interactive. 
3. Launch of an SEO and social media campaign to reach students with the content and begin crowd-sourcing further content.

Successful creation of 100 articles. - Creation of 100 high quality STEM articles.

Successful implementation of features. - Development of quizzes and gamification functionality.

Track page views and new users via metrics (also available on the site landing page) - SEO and social media campaign to generate 20,000 article page views and begin crowd-sourcing further content.

The solution is unique in that it brings together the following elements:

• Teaching science (pedagogy) tools to accelerate learning. This is essential to making dense STEM subjects easier for disadvantaged youth to learn.
• Crowd-sourcing to utilise the global talent pool of educators.
• Content optimised for mobile devices.
• A voting system to surface the best content.
• Gamification and quizzes to keep students motivated and on track.

Learning is most successful when it is engaging and fun. The human brain is a very sophisticated learning machine which evolved to learn in a specific way. This is a key focus of Chalk. The content produced on the platform is validated against a human centred approach which includes effective teaching concept such as: narrative, humour, curiosity, purpose, informal language and imagery. 

The solution uses a website which is freely available to any person with an internet connection and mobile device (or desktop). It is optimised to work on slow internet connections with limited data.

The core platform has already been built. Funding is required to establish:

• Initial content beginning with 100 high quality STEM articles.
• The development of quiz and gaming mechanics for the platform.
• The establishment of an SEO and social media campaign to make the site discoverable to students and to develop a community of educators to produce further content.

The solution needs to become popular in order for crowd-sourcing to be an effective contributor of content. Therefore, an SEO and social media campaign needs to successfully draw enough attention to the platform to begin this process or funding is required to continue to create further content in-house.

We're hoping to connect with like minded people who wish to address the problems of inequality and disadvantage through strengthening the education system. We're looking to establish resources, advice and feedback that can help push the idea further. 

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