Akkad Bakkad

Adaptive and accessible assessment and feedback methods are an important aspect of formal learning as it acts as a performance indicator of learning milestones achieved by the child. These methodologies are difficult to implement in low resource areas, especially when reaching out girls in conflict and emergency zones who have limited access to technology. Akkad Bakkad uses smart feature phone technology to bridge this gap. This learning application is targeted at marginalized children of ages 8 to 12 or tweens which is the most sensitive and exciting time for any child. Instead of focusing on subjects, the focus is on topics or skills needed for this age group for the growth of mind, body and heart alike. The stories arcs draw from the socio-economic context of the children to make them relatable to their lives and create a positive impact along with addressing formal learning outcomes.

About 263 million children and youth (77 girls for 100 boys those of upper secondary school age) are out of school, according to findings produced in a paper released jointly by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report in 2016. “Children in India 2018” report by MSPI reveals that 27.36 cr. children between age 0-14 live in rural India out of which 13.12cr are girl children. Even after acts like Right To Education which makes school education free and schemes like Mid-Day meal and ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ by government, very little improvement has been seen in the retention rates of girls in schools with 4.1% girls between 11-14 still dropping out of school as per ASER report by Pratham in 2018. This percentage is worse in conflict areas and is predicted to be hit even more due to the recent coronavirus crisis. In such a scenario it has become increasingly important to leverage technology and cultural inputs to reach out to these young ladies with a platform which keeps them engaged and motivated to learn and grow which has formed the basis of Akkad Bakkad application. 

Akkad Bakkad, the name derived from a popular Hindi rhyme, is a playful learning application designed for children of ages 8 to 12. On joining the application, the child selects the gender and language preference after which Bujhakkad Didi, our mascot and key problem solver, guides the child through the application. Bujhakkad didi first introduces 2-4 topics/life skills that are likely to be used in the story and then starts telling the story using voice and visuals with minimal text. This story-based content has multiple gateways which test the understanding of cognitive (Soch Bujhakkad) and emotional (Dil Bujhakkad) skills introduced earlier. Points are earned on correct answers while incorrect ones are asked again, using the same concept in a different situation. Students are reminded to revise the concept if necessary, by visiting the library. Weekly hands-on tasks are given which can be subjected to peer voting, focused on building the child’s motor skills (Haath Bujhakkad). The application is built on KaiOS which is popularly found in smart feature phones and uses offline sync feature to address connectivity issues. To build parental trust, USSD technology has been used for them to get performance updates or connect to parent circles.

The solution is targeted at tweens, especially girls living in low resource areas, mainly border areas, tribal areas or those who belong to lower socio-economic background. The field research for the project was conducted in an NGO called Jhamtse Gatsal Children’s Community in the Tawang District of Arunachal Pradesh which shares a disputed border with China. The period of study was one year in which we actively engaged with the children, parents and teachers in the community and nearby schools to understand their engagement patterns and how cultural aspects influence learning. Choice based storytelling, mostly reserved for entertainment and gaming, emerged as a universal setting in which it was easy and effective to test student learning. Since the region had severe internet connectivity issues and the average income of people was also not much to invest in expensive technology, smart feature phones were chosen as the technology for building the application, which had relatively higher penetration. The smart feature phones are in a range of 800INR to 1500INR and come with a KaiOS play store which is becoming the second most widely used around the globe, thereby helping the app to become accessible across communities. 

A lot of girls are known to quit school due to the dangers of sexual and emotional abuse or their lack of knowledge of sanitary hygiene amongst other things. These girls are more likely to be able to address such situations if they are highlighted the importance of learning drawing from their socio-cultural environments through stories. These stories not only cover subject-related applications like health and hygiene, backyard farming, female role models in history etc. but also life skills like decision making, working with teams or breaking of taboos by girl characters of their own age. 

Most applications in the education technology space focus on providing learning content rather than assessment of content. I would look at such organizations as potential partners rather than competitors whose work can be linked in for in-depth understanding based on zonal popularity. Applications like Kahoot, Formative, Convegenius and Socrative have a very different approach of assessing content as compared to the contextual, real-time storytelling approach followed here, so they again cannot be called competitors. Moreover, the holistic approach of mind-body-heart triad of learning and the focus area being audience living in low resource areas, gives a unique context in itself to work upon. NGOs like Pratham and Muskaan Dreams are using technologies like IVRS and Televisions to improve learning outcomes for a similar audience type where the use of smart feature phones to provide interactive, voice enabled content comes with an opportunity of providing more immersive experiences to users. The Kai Store itself is new and while it is replete with utility based and entertainment application, it has very few that support school education. 

The solution aims at creating across device portable technology that focuses on feature phones, smart feature phones, smart phones and laptops, and having built it using KaiOS which uses JSS and HTML as a language for coding which is easy to export, enables just that. Though the technologies itself are not new, this hybrid method of accessing the technology can help empower different stakeholders at different levels of the education hierarchy to be connected and informed depending on their access to technology. For example, data created by children, parents and teachers/content creators on mobile phones can be projected to create detailed data dashboards for the administration. Also, the technology is free and open-source which gives more scope for community participation. 

KaiOS which is focused on providing technology access to the next billion users is a widely used and accepted operating system which according to recent data, has replaced iOS to make it to the second position according to recent statistics, a large chunk of its success owned to its partnerships with companies like Jio and Nokia. Its app store although segmented, is already full of a range of utility and entertainment-based solutions part from games. It is designed such that it can support light-weight applications which can work on lower processor speeds.

Designing for smart feature phone range can be challenging and is an important aspect of working with the technology as well. From personal exploration of these devices, we found voice-based interactions the easiest to work with as the screen size is small and providing keypad input is cumbersome. After a detailed study of device hardware and software features were Akkad Bakkad’s interactions proposed to provide a clean and user-friendly experience.

Although we have entered into this initiative with baby steps, links have already been established to create a bigger picture. We wanted to start with giving examples of what the content should look like due to which we have proposed internal creation of content initially. This interactive content has incentives like giving recognition in the leader boards based on the number of bulbs (cognitive), hearts (emotional) and claps (motor) collected throughout the game levels. Also, believing that no effort can be sustainable without community participation, we aim to create teacher building blocks through which they can easily create their own personalized content and slowly build a rich data resource in time. This data resource is proposed to be rating based to ensure quality of content being posted. Parents have been kept in a close loop through the USSD feature and helplines. Administrative dashboards are proposed as well which fetch data from the app and create region wise analytics of the learning outcomes. Therefore community participation and end-to-end feedback loops can be called the theory of change we believe in here.

We are currently serving the 90 children of different age groups housed at Jhamtse Gatsal, Arunachal Pradesh and learning and creating with them. We aim to extend our testing to include 400-1000 students from different regions of India by the end of next year before we release a market ready version.

We aim to leverage Partnerships through Corporate Social Responsibility and also approach the government to work in a Public Private Partnerships mode to reach financial stability. According to Indian Guidelines such a company needs to be a Section 8 Not for Profit organization and a Section 12 A income tax exemption supported firm to attract more investors.