Baobabooks Education

Baobabooks is a Swiss-based, mission-driven social enterprise that is focused on helping improve literacy skills in young writers. Through steadfast collaborations with educators, our organization empowers learners worldwide and provides them with a safe space to express their thoughts, ideas and creativity.  Rooted in the realms of transformative educational research and innovative technology, our overarching mission is to work across cultures and continents to build understanding, exchange ideas and create a better world. Working in partnership with educators, parents, local communities, schools and other educational groups and governments, Baobabooks helps learners gain confidence in writing whilst also honoring their creative endeavors.

Soukeina, a seasoned professional with an extensive background as an educator and more than two decades of classroom experience, assumes a prominent role as the leader of our Education team. Her wealth of expertise and experience significantly contributes to the organization's vision and operations. In her capacity, Soukeina adeptly provides leadership and strategic guidance, ensuring the seamless advancement of our product development initiatives. Soukeina effectively delegates responsibilities, attentively listens to diverse perspectives, places trust in her team members, and actively learns from their collective wisdom. She actively engages in high-level business development discussions alongside the CEO and founders, leveraging her insights to drive innovative strategies forward. Furthermore, Soukeina actively consults with schools and NGOs, offering her expertise on the value and efficacy of our product. As a key representative, she confidently presents at conferences, collaboratively delivering insightful presentations alongside other accomplished team members.

Driven by a commitment to achieving tangible outcomes, our organisation wholeheartedly recognizes the alignment between our product and the LEAP challenge requirements. As an organization that places teachers at the forefront while leveraging technology, we recognise the need for our product to establish a more robust connection to empirical evidence and prioritize measurable results, in order to maximise its impact on learners.

By strategically partnering with teachers in classrooms, we will be able to observe and measure the tangible effects of using Baobabooks to improve student writing. Knowing that all students learn differently and have different skills and abilities, this approach will allow us to quantify the influence of Baobabooks on individual students. 

We are at a pivotal point in the development of our organisation and by leveraging the resources available from LEAP, we hope to strengthen our evidence base. With access to expert advice and guidance, we are well placed to make our platform an efficient and valuable learning solution for students. 

Baobabooks cultivates educator-friendly spaces to assign, manage and assess writing tasks, while inspiring students and promoting substantial literacy improvement.

Students find themselves increasingly absorbed in a world dominated by technology which, regrettably, often compromises their aptitude for writing and self-expression. Consequently, literacy rates across the globe have witnessed a decline. To counteract this disconcerting trend, it becomes imperative to equip ourselves with tools capable of engaging students effectively in the digital realm, while nurturing their inspiration to write and providing them a place to express their unique voice in a safe environment. Within this safe environment, free from judgment and criticism, students can cultivate their confidence, develop essential risk-taking skills, and ultimately thrive and triumph in their educational journey.

Teachers are increasingly overwhelmed by the administrative demands placed in them in a post-COVID world. Consequently, they seek innovative methodologies to effectively captivate their students, instill inspiration, and efficiently deliver course curricula. By embracing such approaches, teachers can reclaim valuable time to nurture their own creativity within their professional endeavors. It is crucial that these tools are structured, yet capable of accommodating the distinctive requirements and pedagogical approaches of each class and school. In doing so, they empower educators to tailor their instructional methods precisely, ensuring an optimal learning experience for all.

Our teacher-driven platform empowers educators to seamlessly assign, monitor, and evaluate an extensive array of writing projects, encompassing diverse subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology, and everything in between. Our platform optimizes workflow and functionality, offering a rich toolkit that includes invaluable resources such as grading rubrics, story mapping, and an array of other essential features. This comprehensive suite of tools caters to the multifaceted needs of teachers, facilitating their work within both traditional classroom settings and remote learning environments.

Currently, our platform has been translated into eight languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Urdu. Furthermore, in response to specific project requirements undertaken alongside our partners, additional translations, including Mandarin, Hindi, Tagalog, and more, are under discussion for implementation. Our platform supports a diverse range of writing formats, providing students with the freedom to select from five options: picture books, short stories, chapter books, essays, and poems. We are continuously engaged in the development of further formats to expand the creative possibilities available to students.

Students are equipped with a repertoire of tools, including creativity boards, graphic organizers, and writing prompts meticulously designed to ignite inspiration and facilitate the planning, execution, review, editing, and illustration stages of their writing projects. Upon completion, students can submit their writing to their teachers for publication to the Baobabooks library.

An extensive collection of 2.4 million indexed images is seamlessly integrated into the platform, enabling students to select captivating visuals to enhance their work. Moreover, students are able to personalise their creations with their own illustrations by uploading scanned images.

Our platform fosters a collaborative ethos, allowing students to engage in co-authorship with fellow students within their classroom, school, country, or even across the globe. These active collaboration tools foster rich engagement and promote global connectivity, facilitating meaningful interactions and shared creative endeavors.

We have investigated using lexical complexity variables as the endpoints we can assess to demonstrate improvement in written literacy skills over time. Lexical complexity includes the lexical density, lexical diversity and lexical sophistication of a piece of writing. 
We have three senior educators working with us who are leading this initiative and they have done the preliminary research. Based on this, we are interested in building this into our platform using AI to help assess different variables longitudinally to demonstrate improvement over time, compared to a control group.

Baobabooks was selected by the prestigious Qatar Foundation as the European EdTech company for their 2021/22 WISE program. As part of this program, we embarked on a mission to develop an objective measurement system within our platform that would showcase tangible improvement in writing literacy.

As part of this program, we were accepted into the Educate Research Ventures incubator program. This program facilitated the strategic formulation of our Logic Model, which we have included in this submission. With this foundational framework in place, we are now poised to advance further by shaping, refining and integrating our vision into our platform.

Our journey began with the creation of Version 1.0 of our platform, which involved a focused engagement with a single school to gather valuable insights and refine our offering. Building upon this foundation, we progressed to Version 2, where we sought the expertise of 30 beta customers over a span of 18 months. Their invaluable feedback enabled us to further fine-tune and enhance our platform, leading us to the launch of Version 3.0 - a version that exhibits a significantly stronger alignment with the needs and demands of the market.

While Version 3.0 represents a significant milestone, we recognize the paramount importance of delivering objective outcomes and measurements. By doing so, we would ensure the credibility and confidence that schools seek, granting them the assurance that our platform has been rigorously validated as an effective tool for improving writing skills and nurturing literacy proficiency among young writers. This will validate the use of our platform as a trusted solution and will empowers educators with the confidence to utilize it to its fullest potential.

1. How can we best measure lexical complexity; what variables should we use? We would like to show that using Baobabooks will enhance the size, variety and quality of a young writer's vocabulary.

2.  How can we use AI to power this assessment and build our knowledge base to elevate literacy levels in young writers?

3.  How can we define a control group that can be used in conjunction with this work to demonstrate improvement?

We would seek to have a clearly defined set of variables that can be objectively measured.  We would want to have a clear understanding of how we can harness AI to use these variables to effectively measure longitudinal outcomes. In doing so, we aspire to understand the mechanisms by which literacy improvement can be quantified over time.

Central to our pursuit is the formulation of a robust framework for defining the comparative control group, accounting for that may influence literacy advancement over time. Our objective is to develop a nuanced methodology that allows for adjustments, ensuring a rigorous and accurate assessment of the impact of our platform in comparison to external factors.

By addressing these essential aspects, we hope to establish a solid foundation for our measurement framework, reinforcing the credibility and reliability of our platform as a catalyst for literacy improvement.

We will build an advanced AI assessment tool in our platform so that it can be used to provide an objective outcomes measurement of improved writing and literacy skills. We are going to implement the work and define it through this program and it will have foundational importance to establishing our relevance in the market going forward.

Our overarching goal is to define the parameters around lexical density and to formulate a comprehensive longitudinal measurement methodology. This includes considerations related to related to age-based control group data, which are vital for enabling intra-personal measurements and comparisons against initial baseline literacy writing competency. By using this approach, we hope to demonstrate the level of improvement and classify it as no improvement, limited improvement or significant improvement.

Furthermore, we would hope to juxtapose these metrics against the mean values for the relevant age group, facilitating the determination of relative competency. This will show whether the competency level for a given student falls below, aligns with, or surpasses the mean value for the given age group. Such a comparative assessment will enable us to provide a comprehensive and nuanced evaluation of students' progress and relative proficiency within their respective age cohorts.