#ScienceCallsYou

Half of the children in developing countries don't have the technology tools they need to complete their education. 

Every child who does not reach his or her potential is a loss to humanity as a collective. We don't know if the next scientific breakthrough is in the mind of a child in a rural zone.

Can you imagine the future of humanity if all the barriers in education didn't exist and the children were the change that their community needs?

To solve it in a cost-effective and inclusive way we create #ScienceCallsYou 

We transform a simple phone call to give access to any kind of audio content, internet through  Voice and Artificial Intelligence, like have spotify, moodle and voice assistants in simple phone calls

With #ScienceCallsYou every child has access to scientists who share their knowledge to inspire them to create change in their community. 

According to current statistics, 91% of the global student population - around 1,580 million children- are out of class due to school closures during COVID-19 pandemic. Almost half of these children do not have the technology tools they need to continue their education: internet or electronic devices to access digital sources of knowledge.

This particular crisis in the educational system is not totally new, but it has been exacerbated due to the pandemic situation. Before COVID-19, there were 262 million out-of-school children worldwide and 565 million who lived in conflict or disaster-affected countries, whose access to education was compromised.

In Colombia, there are 2 million children in rural areas and 4 million in the cities who do not have access to the Internet or to electronic devices that allow them to continue their education remotely. These children are at risk of dropping out of school prone to become victims of child labour, forced recruitment and falling into the poverty trap.

There is an urgent need to bridge this gap because the problem is severe in remote and rural areas where communities don't have access to the knowledge or cultural legacy of humanity through the internet.

#ScienceCallsYou is a program that joins two educational projects in Colombia: EducALL and ScienteLab. Together we will break down barriers of science and make it accessible to every child.  

EducALL transforms a simple phone call to give access to any kind of audio content, internet through Voice and Artificial Intelligence bringing education to all corners of the world. Making a simple call students can access any kind of audio-based content on the internet (Wikipedia, translator, voice google assistant, spotify, etc) using basic phones without internet connection.

ScienteLab brings scientific experiential education (hands-on) to children in remote areas of Colombia by connecting these communities to a network of scientists that share their knowledge with children to empower their career development and give them the tools to become change agents in their communities.

Indeed #ScienceCallsYou, is the unique program to bring a legacy phone to rural and remote communities in Colombia. Through these calls, students will be able to have access to courses developed by scientific experts and hands-on experiences, at the same time, connecting with teachers (scientists around the world) and fellow classmates, allowing students to have a complete scientific learning experience without no internet connection or smartphones.

Our solution serves: 

1) Children and people in rural areas without internet access but who have coverage to fixed or mobile phone networks (2G), and 

2) Children and people in urban areas with no devices or income but with access to telephone networks. Our preliminary engagement with remote communities for the last four allows us to identify communities with special needs who will benefit in the long term with our solution. 

Those communities are located in remote areas of Colombia in Amazonia (Leticia), Santander (Carcasi), Guajira (Uribia), and Tumaco. Our solution will directly impact their lives promoting access to scientific education and bringing to those communities a scientific unique experience that indirectly is connecting students with scientists as they will become scientific role models to allow them to realize new career possibilities, mentoring, and inspiration for being a change-maker in their communities.  The long-term impact will be to bridge a gap of access to scientific education that nowadays depends on access to an internet connection. Nobody loves what they don't know. If a child has not enjoyed listening to poetry, music, or a fascinating story that makes her imagination fly, they will hardly be able to dream of being a poet, a musician, or the next giant. That is why #ScienceCallsYou will inspire the next generation of scientists in Colombia by bridging the gap between science and remote communities with a simple call to action, but for now literally just a phone call.

We are the cost-effective solution to create quality educational experiences in low connectivity situations by only requiring access to old telephone and cellular networks. With this, we help rural schools and their students to have access to the benefits of m-learning and artificial intelligence to people who otherwise would not have access to it.

EducALL has a Minimum Viable Product that can be tested in Colombia by calling 0315802131 and the platform is available and has shown good reception in the communities that have used it. 

We have tested it with a class from the Gabriel García Márquez School in Soacha with 35 students.

We are also developing the school of ancestral knowledge Saalewa'in mma- friends of the earth - a test in La Guajira with the community of El Manantial to teach the community how to desalinate and make water drinkable, as well as vegetable gardens for self-consumption in their own language. With the support of ScienteLab who convenes leading scientists of the Colombian diaspora and JCI Wayma with the work with the community.

• Appropriate: landline and telephone calls are known to a large part of the population.

• Accessible: When using devices under $5 and without an internet connection

• State of the art education: ScienteLAB has STEAM skills teaching methodologies and EducALL gives access to Artificial Intelligence to have personalized education and gamification.

• Exponential: There is more 2G network coverage than 4G networks, which allows us to serve more users and grow faster.

• Cost-effective: Currently cell phone calls are being displaced by internet calls. This lowers its price and opens up the opportunity to distribute other types of content over telephone networks. 

• Simple: We do not require expensive networks or devices to solve the access to educational content.

• Inclusive: bringing on-demand education to vulnerable areas

• Life-long learning: a child never stops learning since they will have access to knowledge and teachers even when schools are closed or far away.

• Trends: EducALL capitalizes on the global macro-trend of the growth of audio-based platforms such as podcasting and social networks like clubhouse.

We currently serve 237 users monthly, since the technology is highly scalable and is developed on cloud servers we can replicate it in different latitudes. We are currently conducting pilot tests of the platform and developing our own methodologies, once validated we can grow rapidly, so we hope to multiply the number of users by 1000 in a year to reach 237,000 and in 5 years to reach 10,000,000 users.

Impact assessment will be conducted to measure the progress of the project. An entry and exit evaluation will be implemented to consolidate learning of scientific competencies related to personalised content. This will be complemented with recurrent formative evaluations carried out in coordination with teachers of the targeted schools and, secondary sources of information to establish short, medium and long term impact

Indicators:

• Number of students accessing remote learning in Colombia through a reachable and usable tool. 

• Number of curricula adjusted to promote students' scientific thinking 

• Number of devices delivered/effective use 

• Decrease by 2% points to the dropout rate in targeted schools by closing gaps in access to quality and contextualized scientific information to children and adolescents.

• Decrease repetition rate by scientific providing relevant content of interest to students.

• Increase pass rate in science competencies

• Increase in the potential demand for education by targeted educational levels.

• Number of evaluation systems adjusted to evaluate scientific competencies from a formative perspective, moving away from the punitive model. 

• Increase in school attendance rate 

• Increase the degree of satisfaction of parents and the community regarding the relevance and quality of scientific educational content.

• Increase degree of satisfaction of students regarding interest and the relevance and importance for their daily life of scientific-educational content.

At the same time, qualitative information will be taken into account through the perceptions of students, parents and the community, which will be analyzed through NVivo to show trends and changes in mentalities during the implementation of the project.

Full time (2)

Elisa Chaparro

Daniel Garavito

Part-Time (4)

Carlos Angarita

Bryann Avendaño

Maria Paula 

Suryasaradhi

All the team has experience in many fields of education, like EdTech, Scientific Dissemination, and academic research.

Full time

Elisa Chaparro: PhD in Biotechnology. She has contributed to the promotion of science education as part of the Science Clubs Colombia team since 2017, and more recently as co-founder and CEO of the ScienteLab Corporation, focused on the promotion of science as a tool for economic and social development.

Daniel Garavito: Economist and student of MSC in systems and computer engineering. Founder of EducALL calls to educate. Passionate about education and professional learner.

Carlos Angarita: CTO on EducALL. Systems engineer. Teacher in the Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander

Part-Time

Bryann Avendaño: He is a Colombian scientist dedicated to rural development and education. He has 6 years of experience in rural innovation and STEM education. CoFounder of ScienteLab corporation.

Maria Paula Barbero: Biologist, Public Policy specialist, and MS in Development studies with 6 years of experience in pedagogical strategies design, implementation, and evaluation.

Suryasaradhi: Junior developer, an electronics hobbyist, and a cybersecurity analyst, having more than 5 years of knowledge and more than 2 years of hands-on experience as a freelancer in the said fields

We created EducALL as an educational solution to overcome educational barriers in various conditions. We believe that the diversity of the team is one of the main advantages when developing products and understanding our users. That's why we are committed to being a diverse, equity and inclusion team. The team currently employs people in different latitudes.

ScienceCallsYou is already a solution solver. We feel part of MIT Solver because this will be an opportunity to be part of an international network with incredible experience both national and internationally to scale our program to solve inequality of access to educational material and strategies. Becoming a Solver will allow us to establish a quality curriculum that will help consolidate the next generation of scientists that will create solutions that respond to their local needs in rural and neglected communities.

This opportunity will not only visibilize our initiative internationally, but also will help us to make the impact we are dreaming. We are confident that we have the best proposal to respond to an inequity reality that we have seen and lived. However, the Solve program will help us to turn this proposal into a viable and sustainable solution with short and long term impact. Also, We have an amazing team with the experience to scale our pilot in all rural communities, remote without connectivity in the world. 

Potential partners and clients have asked us for more evaluation and impact data to give them the peace of mind to invest in us. Currently the metrics and ensure the scalability of the business model is our main area of work, achieving overcome them we are confident that the project will grow rapidly.

We have alliances and potential collaboration with organizations and foundations focused on basic education in Colombia. Due to our hybrid model of funding (profit and nonprofit), we are interested in partners to scale our project to rural areas. Our goal is to reach more communities and provide financial and human resources to allow the articulation with parallel processes such as orientation and vocational organizations to foster our contribution on inclusion processes, and educational leadership and training.

Our list of potential partners dedicated to supporting education in vocational areas are: Corona Foundation, Bancolombia Foundation, Carvajal Foundation and Plan Foundation. In addition, our long-term processes would be funded by local governments and cooperation agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, UN, The World Bank and international cooperation. Also, we will find partners in organizations that have already had a local impact and preliminary community engagement such as the Canadian embassy, USAID, Spanish cooperation and the Norwegian Council. 

Additionally, as our main focus is building the next generation of scientists, the articulation with the Ministry of Science, Ministry of Education and Universities, will be crucial to align our scientific intervention ecosystem with the national standards and requirements for educating our children. All those alliances will foster the dissemination, implementation and positioning of the project to reach as many rural communities as possible.

We are confident that we can help the ASA to create a more equitable education by offering a non-internet, non-smartphone based educational alternative, which, in addition to improved access, is an advantage in providing an educational alternative that is not dependent on sitting in front of a screen and allows students to access educational podcasts while doing other activities in offline environments.

The technology offered by EducALL works in areas with coverage of any type of calls, making it the option with high connectivity, which can be used for educational purposes on refugee rights, job training and helping them with their political inclusion by enabling them, for example. Participate in discussion spaces in group calls managed by EducALL, as well as share your opinions through voice notes stored and distributed by the platform. We feel that this is an exciting field to develop educational content and help people who are living a humanitarian drama and who we would be very happy to help.

This is the focus of ScienceCallsYou, our dream is to make more accessible and equitable STEM education for the rural children of the world, We believe that every child that does not achieve their potential is a loss for humanity, and we want to help to solve this problem.

Many women are unable to study because of the gender roles imposed on them, which allows them to go to school because they have to take care of caregiving activities. We provide a tool so that they can study from wherever they are, from basic education to training in their rights or education for work, and thus contribute to the achievement of a more equitable society.

One of our main objectives is to contribute to making the benefits of artificial intelligence applied to education accessible to everyone in the world. We are using artificial intelligence to suggest educational content to reinforce and overcome students' difficulties, as well as the content of their interest to help them find their career pathway and help them transform their reality thinking globally but acting locally. Our objective is to use basic cell phones and simple calls to make a solution accessible to vulnerable communities and doing it, we dream to build a better future for all. A future, where no matter where you are living or where you are born, you will have access to knowledge and education to transform our reality.

We can make the AI applied to education accesible to every persons who has access to a phone call

One of our main objectives is to contribute to making the benefits of Artificial Intelligence applied to education accessible to everyone in the world. We are using artificial intelligence to suggest educational content to reinforce and overcome students' difficulties, as well as the content of their interest to help them find their profession and help them transform their reality.

By using basic cell phones and simple calls, we make our solution reach the world's most vulnerable and in doing so, we dream of helping to build a better future.

Currently, our solution is being tested in an indigenous community in the north of Colombia. The community called Saalewa’in mma (Friends of the earth), are part of Wayuú ethnicity, a minority community with problems of access to potable water and food. For this reason, we created a methodology to teach the children to have vegetable gardens for self-consumption, as well as to make water potable and desalinate it. This type of intervention will allow science to be appropriated by the communities to transform their reality. We are very excited about this test and hope to have results by mid-September. This is an example of how we are going to invest our time, resources and effort, and the deep reason behind a tested and proved model that can be replicated and scalable to other communities.