cAReeBook

cAReeBook uses AR to overlay notes, links and photos on a textbook page, creating a shared and personalized study experience.

While discussing with refugee students in Jordanian universities, they raised a problem they are facing in their first year of university. The problem is the fact that the effort needed to keep up academically and integrate socially is frustrating and huge! The same problem is also faced by refugee students in Lebanon, but when they join high school. The problem is aggravated because there isn't enough teachers to provide the correct supervision and follow up these students need.

 When the students described that they study in the textbook with a smart phone in their hands, we imagined a mobile application that would use Augmented Reality to overlay helpful information contextually on the textbook. The students will be able to hover their smart phone on a section they didn't understand and then start a discussion or ask questions around it. Other students will be able to upload helpful information  like notes, images, links and audio explanations to this section. 

If other students hover their phone over the same section, they will see small icons localizing the previously uploaded data and they can benefit from that in their studies. Then the students will be able to like the most useful data they found and this will give credit to the students providing the best information.

The teacher will then be able to interfere to stamp some data that is very important or even upload more data. The teacher will be able to provide more exercises or answer questions. This will give the teacher a real view of the concept that are not well grasped by the students. 

All "liked" and teacher  stamped data will be available for the student to review before the exams

cAReeBook uses augmented reality and proposes an alternative to learning management systems (Moodle…) that is easier to handle and provide a better User Experience and a more collaborative and social learning. The content provided by peers and by teachers is coupled with the printed or digital text book and the student will be able to personalize the data relevant in the context of his/her studies. 

We are using an Augmented Reality mobile application to enrich printed or digital books. The solution relies on the new capabilities of Augmented Reality platforms made possible recently. It is heavily pushing for the adoption of augmented reality in mobile devices in the learning experience and more broadly in the categorization of data based on the environment, in this case, the textbook at hand.

We are partnering with LASeR, an NGO helping and following up with refugee students joining high schools and universities in Lebanon.

We will be meeting regularly with their summer program students to test with them the application. We want to make sure the features of the application and the user experience are aligned with their expectations when studying.

We then want to try with them the proper features to share the data, like/Unlike others’ notes and discuss around specific content. The last part would be to build with them content on a couple of chapters in one book.

We want to keep growing this application by building the critical mass of content targeting at first the official books used in Lebanon. Once the application is mature enough within the next 3 years, we will take it to the next level and target all books allowing students from any high school and university to benefit from this application. This can be started in any country where the use of mobile devices is common among students. Our vision is to build the application that within the next 5 years can really transform learning into a collaborative and social task globally

We already started to partner with NGOs to reach the refugee students in Lebanon. We are building the content of the application with a core team in one of the NGOs and this content will be our entry point to the larger community of refugee students in Lebanon. But also, to the Lebanese students who are studying the same curriculum

Currently we are serving the students who are connected to the NGO we are working with. They are around 30 refugee students attending Lebanese high school. We are working with them to collaborate easily in their learning and help each other achieve better results and at the same time reducing the drop out rate of these students from school

In the next 12 months we will be deploying the application to all refugee students in Lebanon and also to all Lebanese students studying in the same curriculum. We expect the drop out rate of refugee students to be lower. Currently only 1% of eligible refugee students continue through high school in Lebanon and the major reason is the sudden jump in the complexity and learning environment they face when they reach high school

we have a mixed team of developers, UX/UI expert, teacher that have a very strong network in the software development community and among teachers in Lebanon. We are also leading the AR/VR Beirut Meetup group. We also have built a network with a community in Jordan while working in the RLA program that will make it easy to expand in Jordan

We are proposing a sustainable approach for collaborative learning where crowd sourcing the information provided by the students is very important. 

We still didn't decide for the long term revenue model but we have sevra options like:

• Sell the app for a small first usage fee
• Sell add space in the app and provide an add free version
• get sponsorship from book publishers and provide with analytics on the studying styles and difficulties students are facing in the books
• Sponsorship from government/NGOs to sell them the app and provide it for free on public school books
• Sell the app to universities as a complement to their Learning Management System

We believe that we are in a stage at which we should look at stronger collaboration with entities like Solve to be able to take our solution to the next level. We need the proper opportunity makers and a good networking to transform our idea from a pilot to a real solution 

The major barrier that we see is scaling the application. Since our application relies on collaborative learning, it is hence relying on crowd sourcing. In order to do that, we need the proper networking and media exposure