Appviva Interactive Workbook

Appviva workbook, based on our printed and selling Belize Facts and Figures content book, was developed to link (a) civics with (b) state of industry facts and (c) opportunities for personal participation and growth by the youth. The workbook was created for the 2021 school year and we intend to launch Appviva, the second week of September. The workbook is a blend of soft skill and hard knowledge questions.  This interactive workbook is for online or offline use and addresses the global problem of inadequate "knowledge of self" for decision making by young people.  This app empowers youth with the knowledge of opportunities to utilize each nation's comparative advantages for trade and development.  We will partner with regional writers for mutual growth.  

This pandemic has seen many countries implement ad hoc distance learning at the primary and high school level. Though the more advanced countries had experience with distance learning at the tertiary level, which could be implemented at secondary and primary schools, many governments provided devices but had no content to impart. Our solution provides this content online and offline. In Belize there are at least 125,000 rural students who were affected by lack of materials on a timely basis because of no access to digital content. Our printed book and offline capable interactive Appviva ebook will allow students to become familiar with digital soft skills ranging from shading maps, drag and drop, submitting answers and grades to teachers. The medium and higher order activities such as critical thinking and creative works are also addressed by the content of the workbook.  

Our solution is a fully functional decentralized interactive workbook that can be downloaded and worked online or offline. The closed ended questions are graded by the app but the short answers are graded by the teachers.  It links civics, with up to date industry knowledge and entrepreneurial training. It uses interactive content for  teacher graded work or self-assessment and it has widgets. It uses SCORM, LTI, Tin Can and collects grades.

Please find the cover of the content book and the workbook below.  We  have sold 2000 copies of the printed content book.  We have market for about 3000 copies of the workbook either as a print copy or this interactive ebook which we are submitting as our solution in the TPrize 2021.

This product promotes self help, ambition, climate consciousness and sustainable solutions and advancement.  

The ready the content book below.

After reading the content book, they open the ebook app and begin having fun answering closed or open ended questions.  

They can work on maps to identify good soils, label rivers, track hurricanes etc.  They write poems or interpret art with industrial meaning.  Then, they submit grades or finished work to their teachers through the app. 

This interactive ebook serves high schoolers and their teachers.  We were instrumental in the creation of the curriculum and a text.   The content of our text is reflected in this ebook which is for students who had poor experiences using devices during the pandemic.  We have had feedback from teachers who used the text during the pandemic and the response was that, with the text, "teaching went smoothly."   Now we will free up the teachers and students even more to allow them to be creative.  We have created a situation where they can put thier knowledge and creativity to test  in Appviva, our  interactive workbook.  We know that access to internet is a challenge and we have teamed up with Kotobee which allows students to work offline and submit when they get a connection.  This book will develop their educational experience with them becoming better self learners.   

A big focus in the book is creativity.   Our creativity questions range from questioning them about the concept of what is special about Earth.  What is the connection between Earth, life and love.   We bring our creativity in simple assignments like understanding how and why companies like Amazon, Whatsapp, Alibaba got their names.  We then make them name their companies.   The level of soft skills and creativity is difficult to explain here and is best seen first hand.  Judges can write me from the website:  www. belizeinfocenter.org or my email at frantz@belizeinfocenter.org or frantz.smith@gmail.com for free passcodes to view the depth of the content inside of the app which will be live in the second week.  Judges can also contact me to get access to the content book.

The 46 chapters in the workbook are as follows:

PART I: Belize, A Nation in Space and Time. 9

1: The Universe. 10

2: The Earth. 22

Part II: A Caribbean Nation in Central American. 45

3: Belize in the Western Hemisphere. 46

4: Belize’s Strategic Advantage. 56

5: Belize’s Independence and Sovereignty. 64

6: Belize’s Boundaries and Territory. 75

7: The National Symbols. 84

8: The Population of Belize and the Districts. 91

9: The Big Issues, Information for Good Decision Making Attaining Sustainable     Development & The Press. 104

Part III: A Nation of Unique Marine and Terrestrial Resources. 122

 10: The Geography of Belize. 123

11: The Geography of Mesoamerica & Guatemala, Our Western Neighbor 135

12: The Caribbean Archipelago and Jamaica, Belize’s Closest CARICOM        Neighbor 143

13: Belize’s Ecosystems. 149

14: Belize’s Marine Ecosystems and Important Laws Protecting Belize’s Marine       Ecosystems. 157

15: Belize’s Terrestrial Ecosystems and Important Laws Protecting Belize’s       Terrestrial Ecosystems. 169

16: Ecosystem Connectivity, Notable People who have protected Belize’s       Ecosystems, Protected Areas, Biodiversity in Belize. 178

17: Cultural Sites. 187

Part IV: The People of Belize and Their History. 203

18: The Belizean Ethnic Groups. 204

19: The Belizean Identity. 214

20: The Arts, Museums, Libraries in Belize. 224

21: Archeology in Belize and Origin Stories. 231

22: Belizean History: 11,000 BC to 7,000 BC & 7,000 BC to 2,500 BC –                Our first explorers. 240

23: Belizean History: 2,500 BC – 1,500 AD - The Birth of Civilization. 248

24: Belizean History: 1502-1641 – This First Invasion. 256

25: Belizean History 1650s – 1871 – The Second Invasion. 263

26: Belizean History: 1871-1950 – The Last Colony. 274

27: Belizean History: 1950-1964 – A overnight awakening. 282

28: Belizean History: 1964-1981  A difficult resolution. 291

29: Belizean History: 1981-present  A gradual confidence. 300

30: Belizean Timelines. 307

31: Social Justice, Citizenry, Leadership. 312

32: Change, Challenges and Social Cohesion. 324

33: Heroes and Benefactors. 338

34: Guatemala’s Claim Against Belize. 351

Part V: Governance in Belize. 370

35: The Constitution, Three Branches, main Responsibilities of Government and       Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) 371

36: How laws are made, The Criminal Code, Alcalde System, Ombudsman,       & Justices of the Peace and Commissioners of the Supreme Court 381

37: The Political Process. 389

38: The Financial System, Social Security & Taxes and Duties. 397

PART VI:  BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY OF BELIZE.. 413

39: The Structure of the Economy and Economic Data. 414

40: The Industries and Industry Stakeholders. 424

41: The threats and opportunities of Climate Change for industry, Investment       Strategies in Preparation of Climate Change, Addressing Sea Level Rise,       Opportunities for investment 435

42:  Conducting Business, Essential Business Processes, Labour Rights and       Additional businesses processes. 448

43: Real Estate, Incentives to invest, Control of Financial Crimes, Public       and Bank Holidays. 455

44: Travel to Belize, Immigration, Customs and Quarantine. 462

Part VII: Education, Healthcare, Energy, Telecommunications, And                 Sports & Entertainment 477

45: Education, Healthcare & Water 478

46: Transportation, Energy, Ports of Entry & Internet 487

Our solution supports teachers with a text book, a technological product in the form of the interactive electronic workbook app which decreases the burden teachers face of teaching and assessing students on low order class activities.  We offer the students a high level of critical thinking questions tied to industry and entrepreneurship opportunities from modernizing traditional foods to processing rocks for tourists, some of which can be implemented by high school students.

Our interactive ebook is to go live the second week of September, 2021.  

Schools including Belmopan Comprehensive School,  Belmopan Baptist High School, Our Lady of Guadalupe High School in Belmopan , the capital of Belize and St. Catherine's Academy and Wesley College In Belize City use the content books and are calling for the ebook Appviva.   More will come aboard after we launch.  This is a total initial market of about 1200 students, a conservative estimate.   

There is need and demand for our content book and workbook and we are working tirelessly to launch the ebook.  The print copy has been paid for and is being shipped to Belize at the moment. 

Training in civics was abandoned in the Caribbean so many citizens were not educated of their roles in society.  This has caused a challenge of unbelonging across the region.  

Reintroducing civics and tyeing it to business and personal growth and development is the approach we are taking.

Thus our workbook is not typical civics with knowledge of government.  Our workbook tests knowledge of how citizens function in the state, business and personal pursuits.   

We teach them about investing in tools etc in the graphic below.

Introduction of this interactive digital workbook in high school will catalyze various developments:   workbooks such as in English and math because there are local writers in these subjects and there is a limited amount of physics and this can be easily transformed to interactive digital.  The English curriculum would probably be the fastest adopters.  Math and Physics may require more investment and learning.    

This solution is based on the existing technology used by Kotobee TM, an ebook company from Egypt which has been in the digital publishing business since 2011.  They offer services from including exporting apps to DRM settings to uploading ebooks to self-publishing platforms or app stores.  They are able to create ebooks with special features, or in a special app format, such as HTML5 app, desktop app, Android app, or iOS app.  This allows us to sell our ebook on the internet at our www.belizeinfocenter.org website.  

There are ebooks on the market only to a limited extent in Belize and the Caribbean at the high school level.  However Australia's Leading Remotely Piloted Aircraft Trainer has protected its Intellectual Property and cut publication costs by 35%.  Similarly, professors including Dr. Nishith Tripathi and Dr. Jeffrey Reed created the first multimedia ebook, which explains  5G. That book has more than 3,450 minutes of video-based learning and podcast-based learning that engages students with interactive questions, over 3,450 minutes of videos and podcasts.  At the time, no one in the field of wireless communications had developed a multimedia ebook and there was no multimedia ebook competition at all.

Yes, the technology includes risk to our small business. For nine years this business operated an unsecured website.   Now, we have had to convert to a SSL site.  With the new ecommerce site, we may now be a greater target to hackers and hijackers who may try to disrupt our business and try to access our customers credit card information.  

We currently serve about 2,000 students. This reflects about 9 of the 52 high schools in Belize.   In five years we hope to be serving 20,000 students in Belize and the region. At year five, we hope to have a cohort of 15,000 students in Belize and students in El Salvador and Guyana.  

With 5 local interactive electronic textbooks with workbook integrated, we are aiming to bring down the cost of high school education in Belize by $300 per person per year. This would be a saving of $300 x 20,000 or roughly around $6,000,000.  We aim to write the following books over the next five years:

1. My Future Career:A high school level interactive video book of interviews of 50 of the most successful Belizeans with the goal of finding out why they are successful.  This will be a video rich ebook aimed at upper primary and early high school.  IT will teach the good childhood behaviours to be prepared for a successful life.  

2. Understanding the Constitution and legal system of Belize.

3. Maintaining my good health.

4. Cookbook of traditional Belizean foods for home economics

5. Moral Decision making

Besides bringing down costs by using digital, we will also decrease the need to send out money to the UK to pay for traditional high school books.   

We believe that our books can inspire a significant number of young people to aspire and achieve more.   

We measure our progress on the amount of copies we sell. For the Belize Facts and Figures, content book, we have sold about 1800 copies since 2019. 

Our Workbook for Belize Facts and Figures has just come on the market but we have commitments from about 6 high schools but we have been delayed with print copies.  So our parallel interactive ebook is our early market entry strategy.  

The annual cohort of high schoolers in Belize is around 7000.  We would like to serve at least 1/2 of these children with fun products.  Our aim is to take the pain out of online education.  We will contextualize it and provide education so relevant that the children will recognize the value they are getting.

There is one creative leader who is the main writer. To date there are two writers on a part time basis.  

We have 4 main artists.

One book designer from another company.

We also use the service of a web developer.

The developer of the app is another company but we provided the creative outputs.  

1. Links between industry and education: The creative director works with the Ministry of Investment in the Government of Belize. He is a writer and, though not a professional educator, has lectured in the social aspects of agriculture at the University of Belize. He works closely with the export oriented industries of Belize which benefit from investment incentives and is aware of labour needs.  This creative director has taken the IDB course on digital teaching in the year before the pandemic.

2. The other two writers are high school educators familiar with the state of pedagogy in Belize.   Their input has been invaluable with their designing the workbook to reflect Blooms Taxonomy.  

Our team comprises one man and two women, all of different ethnic backgrounds.  We aim to serve all young people of Belize and be blind to color, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, national origin, and belief systems.

We actively share our books by mailing copies to rural areas that have limited access to books. 

Our hope is to get more copies to at risk urban youth where there are large populations experiencing poverty of finance, ideas and hope. The more schools that adopt the books will mean that we can subsidize copies to the urban youth.  

Our main need to gain vindication and credibility to show to the few remaining detractors of our work in Belize.  We also want to show teachers/schools who refuse to do business with us that our product is world class and way above and beyond what they are use to.

We may need assistance in distribution.

We need to know how we can adopt our work for partnerships in the Caribbean especially in Guyana, Dominica and El Salvador in Central America.  We would like to market our cultural education and renewable resources industry knowledge to children in these friendly nations. 

We need widgets.  These will help with games in the book for the next editions. We need more options for closed ended questions which the computer can grade which will require less teacher assessment.

We would also like to explore the possibility of integrating Artificial Intelligence to grade some of the work maybe like the short answers.  

We would like to be able to work with Dr. Jonathan Hersch of Chapman University who has done previous work in Belize for the IDB.  We would like to help create some of his maps of economic activity, but simplified for high school students to see what are the areas of the country where there is high economic activity, were the GDP is being generated.  We would tell the students what are the spinoff, upstream and downstream opportunities in these geographic areas, and how to prepare to take these opportunities. We would like to make these maps interactive as our current maps in the workbook. We would like to be able to include simplified versions of these Dr. Hersch economic heat maps in our content and workbook.   

We also need to work with some game developers who can develop about 6 types of widgets for our second version of the book for 2022.  

Finally it would be good if we could have developers provide the students with facilities to upload videos of poems, songs or other content that they create.