Plush World

Foundational Literacy is the gateway to academic achievement, and the difference between a successful career, and a school-to-prison pipeline.  In the USA over 5 million children in low-income households are being left behind and 250 million children worldwide are at risk of not reaching their potential.  90% of Brain architecture is set in the first 3 years, and for every child who can get a set at Early Head start, 10 children cannot attend because of lack of funding and seats. 

*For Solve Only*

Our Solution is Plush World.  Social Robots have evolved incredibly from the days of JIBO, and opened up Bright Horizons beyond the existing Smart Speakers of Alexa.  JIBO

MIT Mini Cheetah has inspired Commercialized Social Robots Petoi

Licensing content from Disney has made it possible to create a Story Time buddy -- Tonie Box

iRobot teaches children to code before they can read with their Root Robot.  An intuitive MIT scratch based platform allows a young child to place blocks and program a robot by using the Visual Coding platform

We propose to combine these concepts into a Smart Plush Early Language Learning System for Foundational Literacy.  Rather than using the Scratch platform only to code, we customize it for Story Telling.

We build a community of Educators, Parents, Children into a Learning Group with a Content Platform that allows content to be uploaded and monetized similarly to Youtube.  

We develop integrations for Community partners such as Libraries, Museums, Daycares, Preschools, Ethnic restaurants such as Mexican, Indian, Chinese, and Grocery stores among others where active exploration opens modules of content for children to learn.  Content is integrated into our Plush System and synchronized with our Plush Objects.  As simple as the iPod + iTunes + Podcasts, we provide a new level of Foundational Literacy for 0 to 3 PreK learners.  Our dashboards and Virtual Worlds create experiences for Virtual play dates that allow the child to be primarily engaged with their friends, and family through their toys, and bring playful learning into all of the spaces where they spend their time.  Adults can visit this Virtual learning space and upload content, quests, and adventures for the children in their learning group, and see how they are progressing. 

The ability to see what content children love to engage with, and interesting activities that they spend time on, makes learning relevant, and fun.  It brings Voice and Choice to the Voiceless and provides Montessori self-directed learning opportunities to marginalized children and communities. 

We support 50+ languages, and customize our content for Bilingual Learners. 

Our solution serves Low-Income Communities starting in the USA, and moving to Global communities that have access to the internet.  Approximately 5 Billion people have access to the Internet, and 250 Million children are in danger of not reaching their potential.  We start with the 5 million children in the USA who are underserved, and we extend our services Globally to both the 250 Million children who are in danger of not reaching their potential, and the broader public.

These underserved children do not have adequate PreK education, and we bring our platform to help bridge the gap.  Our Technology builds bridges across geographic locations and Socioeconomic boundaries.  We reunite refugees with their villages, and we provide a comforting learning ecosystem for children separated from their families.  

COVID 19, War refugees, Climate Refugees, immigrants, and migrants all are impacted by the disruption of their learning environment and these extreme events have exacerbated already extensive inequity.  We help to quilt and mesh together a vibrant new Social Fabric that will change the world.

Our Team includes Technology Veterans with Executive, Research, Design, and Partner level experience from renowned companies and institutions such as MIT, Harvard University, Bose, IDEO, Disney, Apple, and Microsoft.  Having a deep knowledge of Early Childhood Education, Innovative Technology development, Human-Centered Design, and Global Industry partners positions our Team to deliver like never before.  

It is our ability to blend the best research from Academia, with the most innovative technology prototyping and mass production that gives our team the ability to reach every child.  We have experience working on products that ship over 100M units Globally.  This gives us the knowledge, network, and credibility to deliver a solution that amazes children, families, and communities and change the world.

Many of the technologies that we are integrating into our Platform and Robots have been pioneered at MIT Media Lab, MIT CSAIL, Lemelson MIT, etc.  Products such as JIBO and Social Robots more generally, as well as the ability to help launch startups that have Global impact like Bose, Qualcomm, and iRobot make MIT a great fit.

  MIT has a partnership with Harvard called Reach Every Reader which focuses specifically on Foundational Literacy and the broader community in Cambridge, Boston, and NYC has an outsized impact on the education sector.  MIT professors have developed community-level efforts that change the social fabric such as Fab Lab.

Moreover, MIT has developed platforms in partnership with academic partners such as EdX.  MIT is dedicated to achieving Educational Equity and access through its solutions such as Open MIT.  

Thus, MIT Solve represents an excellent community to help us change the world.  

Children ages 0 to 2 are not fully verbal.  Existing Speech Recognition engines do not support these children and even 3-year-olds cannot fully interact with powerful learning platforms.  We develop a gesture-based interface and Tangible play interface that leverages the early capability of children to grasp objects with our innovative wearable technology aids to support proven research that engaging with objects and content directly accelerates learning.

Moreover, our technology platform blends the Virtual World with the Physical world, which is a very under-explored product design space.  MIT has great projects like Speech Blocks that works wonderfully in the digital space, and we see opportunities to customize this academic research and combine it with other research out of other academic institutions  such as 30 Million words from the University of Chicago

MIT has a history of supporting innovative relationships between academia and Industry e.g. Lego Mindstorms, and our solution is innovative about sharing stories both from traditional Publishing as well as User-Generated Content that brings Cultural representation and Voices forward into the world we want to live in.

We have been invited by NSF to provide a Full proposal to revolutionize Foundational Literacy with our Smart Plush Early Language Learning System.

Our impact Goals are 

1.) Achieve our research goals that show that gestures integrated with the Tangible Play experience can accelerate Foundational pre-literacy and literacy in low-income children ages 0 to 3. (Both Mono-Lingual, and Bi-Lingual children)

2.) Expanded Project-Based Learning can continue the gains obtained in the early years to 4 to 5-year-old age group, and ultimately establish strong readers through the 8-year-old age group where testing identifies academic trajectory.

3.) Ship Plush Systems to 1 Million Head Start demographic children, and build a roadmap to deliver Plush Systems to 5 Million children in the USA

4.) Establish Partnerships that will allow Global Production to reach 100M children.

5.) Develop Partnerships that provide Content to underserved communities for Free e.g. Public Libraries, Museums, and Public Schools among others.

Our progress is most aligned with the following development goals.

Within our product, we will measure progress for Foundational Literacy, based on the Head Start Framework.  Moreover, we will measure our progress by the number of children served both directly and through partners.   If we are selected for the Solve program, we will also work with advisors to build an innovative set of KPIs that resonates with our innovative platform that may not yet exist in industry or academia due to the new capabilities our system allows.

Our Theory of Change is that children learn  Foundational Literacy best when they are immersed in daily experiences with people who love and care for them.  We believe that technology can provide valuable structure to learning, and also enable the exploration of content that goes beyond the knowledge that a single parent/family has.  The is an old proverb that says, it takes a village to raise a child.  We reconnect children with their village.

Our core technology is a modular Plush System that integrates AI/Object Recognition with a Foundational Literacy Learning System to bring the world of Sesame Street to every home, day care, PreK/Early Head Start in the USA.  The Technology integrates IoT, Robotics, AI in the Physical world with a Content Management platform and AR experience in the mobile and Cloud Metaverse as well User-Centered Design to connect children with learners and educators in a new Social Fabric.  It is this End to End designed Experience that like the Apple iPod/iPhone/iPad + iTunes and App store can create synergy across the Social Robot for Foundational Literacy Ecosystem.

We know our Technology works because there is extensive research including at MIT on all areas of the core technologies.  It is the integration of these technologies and the customization to our age group that requires a Research and Development phase, which we are engaging with NSF through their SBIR grant process to complete.

In addition to the research already provided earlier, there are additional research that shows preliminary steps to our platform through basic research.

There are PHD level research that bring gestures into the Tangible space

The primary work that is needed is to develop Human-Centered Design studies that customize the research for the age group and Foundational Literacy goals for the demographic we are focusing on.  One of our advisors is a former IDEO partner, and by partnering with Design firms who specialize in the Foundational Literacy space, we are confident we can design a great experience.