ELAB

At ELAB, we want to integrate gamification with NFTs through a blockchain in our online learning platform, allowing us and other education creators, make courses in which our students build characters, worlds, collect gear and have fun while they learn, but at the same time, these items have real-world value. Making the first play to learn to earn model and making this a source of income for our students while they build their capacities to break out of poverty. ELAB will not only bridge the opportunity cost to get training for students but also allow educators to reach a wider audience.

During our years of working with BOP populations we have learned that for a great majority of them sacrificing a full day of earnings in order to get trained is not possible. Latin America currently has the biggest number of unemployment in the world, according to the World Labour Organization. This is only made worse by the enormous amount of informality found in the region. People cannot get access to training in the skills needed by the job market currently and, while online education has made training more accessible to some, we have identified several problems that are affecting the online adoption of education, not only in the developed world, but also in the developing world. Due to the pandemic:  

1) Online education is boring, in accesible, and innefective. People in developing countries have had a 3-10 year adoption increase of technology, but the current online education methods, don't make the cut. 

2) The gaming industry grows, but without resources is inaccessible for young people as a career

3) Concepts like gamification don't help Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) students compensate the opportunity cost that it is to study when the need to generate income is larger. 

By integrating gamification with NFTs through blockchain, we sought to generate a learning platform in which educators can create curses that will allow students to build and develop characters while generating income in the real world. That would result in the first “play to learn and earn” model, becoming an educational and income source to students which allows them to develop abilities and capacities to help them to overcome poverty. Our solution, ELAB, will be a complete e-learning platform that provides training in hard and soft skills necessary to access good jobs.

Bottom of the pyramid populations cannot afford to completely dedicate their time to training as one training day would equate to a whole day without working. Therefore, our project proposes to solve this problem offering economic benefits during the training process that will act as incentives and help this vulnerable population to not worry about entering a training program to be inserted in society. In this way, the project will help to the construction of a more just world through inequalities reduction. Finally, this space will also allow the development of communities among the participants in which they could strengthen their competitiveness as their solidarity and mutual support. 

Our main target populations and our cause is Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) vulnerable groups who cannot afford the opportunity cost of getting trained. In our 4 year experience working with vulnerable groups at the BOP, we’ve seen countless NGOs offer training, webinars and online courses; however, in order to access this trainings people at the BOP must stop engaging in activities that generate income for their families. Therefore, we developed ELAB, a gamified platform that through an NFT powered play to earn model will allow them to generate income while they receive training in valuable skills. 

Therefore, our idea can change aid forever, and impact the lives of thousands as this will make international development more sustainable. This will not only allow our methodology of entrepreneurship to reach more people and create more social changemakers, but also allow other educators to reach a wider base of students. Students in low income households willl now be able to obtain on demand skills and thus get access to the formal job market and they can do so while still generating a necessary income for their families. 

As the TPrize Challenge focuses on developing the skills of under-resourced populations across Latin America and the Caribbean we believe ELAB aligns perfectly to this challenge. ELAB proposes create the first online learning platform using the ‘play to learn and earn’ model allowing people to have economic benefits while developing capacities. Moreover, they will have a job without sacrificing training and vice versa allowing them to build their path to overcome poverty and reduce inequalities. It will open up training and education to a whole new range of people who were not able to access it before.

Our solution is in the prototype stage since we are starting to build a working model of the platform. In the same way, we are in the middle of concluding due diligence with the IDB Lab in order to fund a project, World Change Makers Homecoming, which focuses on training 1500 migrants and local population to become social entrepreneurs. Part of this funding will go towards building ELAB and this beneficiaries will be the first to test out this platform and learning model and thus move our solution to the pilot stage. 

Online education has played a central role over the past couple of years, and this reality is marked by the growth of the ‘Gamification’ industry which besides from growing, it has become more accessible to its users. By combining these two elements, we have developed our own innovative idea based on the “play to learn” model that allows young people to learn while having fun. The proposed structure is that through NFTs games we can give value to the elements that make up the game, so that the user / player can later exchange them for a real value. This is possible as NFTs have real use to exchange them for products and money in digital platforms. This idea uses new technology to solve a problem that has never been addressed before and it's too expensive to solve in a typical way (paying poor people to learn).

 
ELAB will not only host our own methodology, World Change Makers which trains students in entrepreneurship, social innovation and leadership, but will host courses containing anything from soft skill to technical skills necessary in the current market. ELAB is innovative not only for the cutting edge technologies it will implement, but also due to the fact that it will no longer make getting training a sacrifice for vulnerable communities but an asset to themselves and their families since they will be able to generate income while studying.

ELAB unites diferent technologies but a its core we find blockchain, NFTs and machine learning. NFTs are non-refundable tokens which are uniquely generated within the blocchain. We are using this in a gamified platform that through artificial intelligence will generate this for students who will be able to access them, use them and sell them in an NFT marketplace. We will also have an ingame token that will have real value in the game. We want to use Binance smart chains because of the low gas fees. The second technology is machine learning as a service. We want to use GPT-3 and DALL-3 in order to generate our own unique NFTs. All of these technologies will be applied through the concept of evolved gamification.

Even if blockchain has been close related with Bitcoin, as it is its back technology, it has several other applications. According to the authors, “this technology consists of a distributed database of records, or public ledger of all transactions that have been executed among participants in the system and are verified by the majority” (2016). Therefore, every online transaction involving digital assets could be verified, but without compromising the parties’ privacy.

Financial institutions are relying on blockchain as it is considered to be secure. For instance, it has been used for insurance of assets ownership. Regarding non-financial applications, documents verification authenticity can be done through blockchain. In notarization the privacy will be secure in document certification, as the company Stampery does. This technology also provides a model to proof existence and possession of legal documents without relying on central authorities, as Proof of Existance works (Crosby et al., 2016).

NFTs are unique units of data that cannot be swapped or replaced for another as an equal. It takes the characteristic of a digital certificate of ownership and authenticity, which connects to the blockchain function.

In video games using the NFTs, the player owns the assets they collect. Usually, these NFTs can be sold virtually among players which transform entertainment into a business. It is important to highlight that we are living in a digital age where digital assets as gaining as much relevance as physical ones. Therefore, related marketplaces are expanding (Allinson, 2021). For instance, one of the most expensive NFT ever sold is a character in Axie Infinity which was purchased for $100,000.

Allinson M. (2021). Non-Fungible Tokens in Video Games. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/04/29/non-fungible-tokens-in-video-games/42881

Crosby, M., Pattanayak, P., Verma, S., & Kalyanaraman, V. (2016). Blockchain technology: Beyond bitcoin. Applied Innovation, 2(6-10), 71.

One of the problems that can be anticipated is the fact that many elements of the market do not understand or are not ready for the different technologies involved. Unfortunately, the Blockchain is usually associated with Bitcoin, especially in Latin America, scams like I Markets Live have given it a bad name. However, for this reason we sought to work in the region and the United States in order to not limit the progress of the project, since it is considered that the time is right due to the current cryptocurrency and blockchain boom at a global level even when several markets emerging do not understand. Nonetheless, there is the case in the Philippines of Axie Infinity, an NFT game that took the entire population helping to pay the bills in the pandemic and massively adopted also in Venezuela. When it comes to blockchain, decentralization is a positive aspect since governments and regulations have very little influence in its use, since it is not centralized in any country. NFTs and cryptocurrencies cannot be taxed unless they are exchanged for typical currencies. However, the company seeks to comply with all regulations and it is not anticipated that there will be a problem for the business line or platform per se.

As our solution has not yet started its execution, currently it is not serving people. However, once it is put into action in the pilot, by the time one year has elapsed, 1500 people will be served. The amount of people will be participants of the pilot that will take part in World Change Makers Homecoming. In the same way, due to our growth plan, our solution will serve 5000+ people in five years. 

Due to the rising problems regarding access to technology and education, we believe that our platform is a great contrasting solution. Therefore, we sought to reach 4 countries with our product in the first year, mainly in Latin America. In this way, lives of low income, especially young, people will be positively affected by be given a possibility to learn while they earn, moving forward in the path towards overcoming poverty. These countries will be reached by global bilingual marketing and work with a global accelerator for positioning with users and clients in the western hemisphere. Regarding the next five years, we project to have active users from Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Middle East, and Europe. Also have created a complete game parallel to the platform with a better use of the NFTs and the ‘play to earn’ model. By then, the platform will be monetized and staffed with a team of developers and creatives. In addition, there will be more playability given to a game outside the educational platform to maximize user returns on play to earn through NFTs. The developing, design, and narrative teams will be trained in complete videogames by Platzi and its videogame's school. 

We will measure our progress through monitoring and reporting. Our company will design results, monitoring and evaluation matrixes to orderly keep track of our achievements. The progress will be measured monthly during the first year, and quarterly from that point on. The following milestones are stablished to contrast the progress:

• Final development of functional product for evaluation (month 3 of financing).
• Product testing and iteration (month 4)
• Iteration development (month 5)
• Iteration testing (month 6)
• Minimum Marketable Product Development (month 8)
• Kickstarter pre-sale launch (month 9)
• Generation of regional strategic alliances (month 12)
• Raising additional seed capital (month 13)
• Alpha Test (month 10)
• Beta Testing (month 14)
• Pre-sale delivery and complete sales strategy (month 15 onwards)

Currently 6 people are working on this solution full time within our non-profit, two people are working on it part time on the more technical side.

We are a real team working on programs and projects that are changing the lives of thousands of people in the region.  We have been working for over four years with social entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid doing what everyone tells us is impossible, but we have proven that the right program, training, connections and capital can empower our students to change not only their lives and their family's lives, but their community's life as well.  

We are in the due diligence process with the IADB Lab (BID Lab), and in September we will beging building an e-learning edtech platform to host our methodology and courses for the project that will scale our methodology to 10 cities in Ecuador and Peru for people in human mobility (migrants and refugees) and reception community (locals). This team is a group of experienced trainers, programmers, designers, administrators and communications specialists. We have been training young people at risk for four years and through ELAB we can maximize the impact of our work.

We are a diverse and capable team in all different areas needed to bring this project to live, all of them committed to making a difference in the lives of thousands of young people who were affected by the pandemic.

Our leadership team has gender parity and it is our organizations leading principle to embrace diversity and equality. Moving forward ELABs’ team will continue with these principles and commit to inclusion and diversity, not only in personnel but also in providers we work with, beneficiaries and partners. Given the fact that we plan to work with vulnerable communities, and have done so in the past with our NGO Codeis, all the team has received training and sensitization to gender, migration and dealing with indigenous communities.

We have decided to apply to the TPrize challenge as we believe it is an amazing opportunity to receive mentroship and financial suppor from experts in the field of technology and education. In the same way, getting to network with other innovators in the region will allow us to expand our vision for impact.

Getting help in these areas will allow us to scale the impact of our solution. Finance will allow us to perfect our revenue model. Business model will make our solution more sustainable. Public relations will help with the adoption barrier we mentioned. Product and technology will allow us to perfect the platform.

We would love to partner with organizations such as MIT, Binance Labs, Y Combinator and the Cardano Foundation. All of these institutions can give us prizeless mentroship and networking opportunities which will allow us to take the solution to a whole new level and reach our desired level of impact.