Blue Brick School

Blue Brick School is an ed-tech initiative of the US-based non-profit organization Visions Global Empowerment.

Our Mission

Blue Brick School's (BBS) mission is to enable quality e-learning for every child in their home language.  

Our Purpose

Our purpose is to empower educators globally to build, share, and customize local language, adaptive e-learning activities, books, and courses for online or offline play.

Our Objectives

Our first objective is to make efficient and repeatable activity creation the core interaction of Blue Brick School's free, open-source platform.  Activity creation entails making e-learning games and read-aloud books that can be flexibly combined to create lessons and courses.

Our second objective is to increase under-resourced children’s access to quality e-learning by partnering with funders and organizations to support online and offline tablet-based e-learning programs using BBS content. The BBS school management system allows teachers to assign personalized courses while also tracking individual learner and whole class progress.

Our Target Populations

Our platform targets tech-savvy teachers globally, who have the skills and motivation to create, edit, and use BBS content in their classrooms. Our second target population is governments, schools, and non-profits worldwide who are working to increase children's literacy rates. We partner with such organizations to distribute BBS through e-learning programs.  All of our activities align with learning standards, and our initial focus is on developing content for preschool through grade 2 learners. 

Our Core Values

We value collaboration, innovation, inclusivity, equal opportunity, and educational quality rooted in research. We believe in collaboration at a macro level, with partners working towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and at a micro level, with schools and individuals aspiring to create change. By design, our platform encourages collaboration, as well as innovation. We provide activity and book authoring tools for any user to generate engaging e-learning content. Inclusivity and equal opportunity are key values for us, especially since we recognize that low literacy is often due to exclusive educational approaches. Finally, we value the importance of evidence-based programming.

Why We Started

Literacy sets the foundation for all future learning and mother-tongue language learning is a crucial first step towards tackling low-literacy. BBS is a niche generator of free, high quality content for under-resourced populations with limited access to technology and the internet. Research has shown that it is important for children to see themselves represented in what they read and hear (Best, Clark, and Picton, 2020).  BBS tools enable easy modifications so that minority language learners can see their identities affirmed on screens.

As the Team Lead, Meera Pathmarajah defines the overall strategic direction of Blue Brick School. She has over twenty years of international development experience, along with Masters and Doctoral degrees in International Educational Policy, and is co-founder of Blue Brick School's parent organization, Visions Global Empowerment. Meera works closely with the Blue Brick School Technology Director to determine project priorities and lead day-to-day operations. She also fundraises, writes grants, plans and manages the organization's operating budget, approves hiring decisions, liaises with project donors, manages e-learning partners, and supervises content development. Meera has worked closely with dozens of teachers and education experts to develop Blue Brick School content and to identify technical improvements needed to improve the functionality and user experience of the platform. 

Scaling Blue Brick School (BBS) is a strategic priority for Visions Global Empowerment, the parent organization of BBS.  We have been working on the BBS platform since late 2018, and are now well positioned to market the platform, secure new partnerships, and get as many teachers as possible using BBS.  We are keen to benefit from LEAP Project support, as we know that this will give us an added advantage when pitching BBS to funders, schools, and partner organizations. Meera, the Team Lead, and Ivan, the Technology Director, are fully dedicated to working on BBS. We will have no problem scheduling our time to support the LEAP Project sprint. Our supporting team members are eager to learn from this experience with the LEAP Project, and will readily make themselves available as needed to participate in this experience.  

Visions supports programs in India, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua, and each country has a registered organization headed by a Country Director who leads a team of staff.  Each Country Director is keen to implement BBS in their country. They are excited to participate in the LEAP Project sprint for their own professional development, and with the intention of implementing similar research projects in each of their countries.

In India, we have been implementing BBS with children in two learning centers since early 2022. The India team would be thrilled to understand how to capture the impact of the program on children's learning outcomes. 

Blue Brick School empowers educators to freely build, customize, and share activities and books for online and offline play.

Globally, 70% of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple sentence by the time they are ten years old (UNESCO et al., 2022). This learning crisis, exacerbated by COVID-19 school closures, has been brewing for decades. Meanwhile, an established body of research suggests that children learn best when they begin learning in their mother tongue (World Bank, 2021).  Yet according to the World Bank, nearly 37 percent of learners in low- and middle-income countries are taught in a language they do not understand.  

There is little regard for the importance of mother tongue literacy instruction despite evidence that shows, once reading fluency is achieved in a first language, learners can readily transfer those literacy skills to a second language (Cummins, 2007). Moreover, the hype to introduce English early, combined with resource constraints and poorly informed language education policies, coalesce to deprive children of local language learning resources.  

Preliminary research on digital literacy games for young children, such as Feed the Monster and Khan Academy Kids, suggests that e-learning has the potential to improve literacy skills (Koval-Saifi & Plass, 2018; Chary et al., 2019).  While such games provide engaging content, most apps are in English (Vaal, Ly, and Levine, 2015) and cannot be freely customized for different language learners.  Also, most e-learning content is available online, but cannot be accessed in offline contexts.

Learning variability has been a key driver behind Blue Brick School's (BBS) design. We want children to have choices while learning, to feel motivated, and to play and learn based on their individual preferences. By opening up high quality e-learning game creation to educators worldwide, we aim to host an ever expanding library of standards-aligned gamified content.

The BBS platform is currently accessible to both parents and educators. When parents log in, they create individual child accounts so that each child user can play our available Foundational Literacy course, which includes 3 levels, 16 lessons, and over 300 activities. The course was designed by teachers in a way that mirrors a student’s journey through a year of preschool. Each activity takes only a few minutes to play, but together, they gradually build learners’ knowledge and skills related to letter recognition, letter-sounds, vocabulary, listening, writing, speaking, and much more. The course is available in English and Spanish, and will soon be available in Tamil and Sepedi.

When educators login, they can either build activities and books from scratch, or they can browse content in our global library of standards-aligned activities and books. The BBS Foundational Literacy course activities were created by our team using platform tools.  The books available on our platform were sourced from existing digital book platforms (StoryWeaver and BookDash). In the future, we expect live users to publish and add to the collection of activities and books in our platform library. 

After browsing the global library, educators select any activity or book to duplicate to their personal library.  Next, they open the copy of the activity or book from their ‘My Library’ tab, and proceed to freely edit the activity by customizing graphics, characters, text, and voiceovers.  Content can also be translated into new languages. We use Google's Speech-To-Text service to transcribe voiceovers and automatically match audio with text in the scripts.

In addition to building and customizing content, educators can compile a playlist of activities to create a course. They can also add students to create class lists, and assign any course to each class. In the future, we plan to add a feature whereby teachers can control a course's activity sequencing based on student scores. In this way, the course becomes personalized and adaptive based on learning variability. Learners can repeat activities until proficiency is reached, or practice more activities as assigned by their teacher.

Foundational research

In 2019, we conducted a review of open-source software created by five finalists from the Global Learning XPRIZE. We downloaded and installed each software from Github onto an Android tablet and reviewed each finalist based on its design, technology, and learning potential. We also researched existing e-learning apps, including Khan Academy Kids, ABC Mouse, SmartyAnts, Quizlet, and IXL Learning to inform our e-learning game development. In our early years, we also interviewed and networked with multiple organizations in the early literacy ed-tech space, including Curious Learning and the International Rescue Committee. 

Literature reviews of language learning and mother tongue language research remain an ongoing aspect of our work.

Formative research

E-Learning Program Implementation

Blue Brick School is an ed-tech initiative of Visions Global Empowerment (Visions), a US-based nonprofit organization founded in 2003, with operations in four countries.  Prior to developing Blue Brick School, from 2015 to 2020, Visions implemented e-learning programs across six schools in rural Tamil Nadu, India, benefitting more than 1,000 primary school children.  We observed how access to tablet devices pre-loaded with interactive, self-paced digital learning programs had a dramatic impact on school attendance, learning motivation, and teachers’ digital literacy skills.  A key takeaway from this experience was that families, learners, and teachers deeply appreciate when technology is introduced in classrooms.  However, content needs to be locally relevant, structured, and pedagogically sequenced.  Such comprehensive e-learning programs are rarely free and available for offline use. 

Researching Literacy Standards

In order to create a comprehensive literacy course, we first derived a PreSchool skills list based on US Head Start Early Learning Outcomes. We  crosschecked this list with preschool literacy skills in Canada, South Africa, Singapore, Mexico, and the UK.  We held workshops with teachers and game designers, and worked with our software development team to create activities aligned with each of the 41 skills.  Before going into production, we tested the games with dozens of children to obtain feedback and make improvements to the games.  Through this iterative process, we developed our Foundational Literacy (PreK) course.

India and Guatemala Beta Trials

In 2022, we beta tested Blue Brick School through tablet-based e-learning programs in India and Guatemala.  In Tamil Nadum, India, 50 children from two rural learning centers played the foundational English literacy course three times a week for 30 minutes each session. After two and a half months of playing Blue Brick School content, their average score on a twenty-question pre-literacy skills assessment increased from 55% to 85%.  In Guatemala, 30 children played the BBS foundational literacy course in Spanish for 60 minutes three times a week.  After three months, their average score on a Spanish pre-literacy skills assessment increased from 76% to 88%.  One hundred percent of the students responded that they had a high level of satisfaction playing the tablet games when they were working properly.

Our foundational research informed the design of Blue Brick School e-learning activities in terms of game mechanics, learning engagement, reward structures, duration of activities, UX/UI elements, and learning variability.  From the Global Learning XPRIZE, we observed that e-learning literacy activities can become monotonous if games repeat too often and we noted the importance of creating clear pathways for learners to understand their own progress in the course. We closely studied Khan Academy Kids' simple, engaging literacy activities that teach bite size amounts of learning objectives while also motivating children to continue playing with fun, attractive characters, visuals, and rewards.

Our use of literacy standards to guide our course design prompted us to frequently consult teachers so that we were designing and verifying lessons based on real world classroom experiences.

Our fieldwork experiences solidified our conviction that tablet-based e-learning programs can profoundly stimulate children's motivation to learn and develop literacy skills.  In our Beta trials in India, which took place in after-school learning centers, we observed children attending the centers more regularly, and spending longer hours there. Parents expressed their gratitude and desire for the program to continue, noting that their children appeared to be learning more English in two months than they had ever learned in previous years at their regular school. We have not yet implemented a local language beta trial of Blue Brick School in India, but intend to do so later this year in 2023, once the course translation is complete.

Through networking with other organizations, it became apparent that the cost of translating apps is often prohibitive.  This encouraged us to persist with development of our platform's translation tools, which allows any activity to be easily translated into local languages.  Research on mother tongue language learning and children's literature informed our design of tools that allow any character and visual to be displayed so that activities can be made locally relevant.

User feedback has dictated the development of our platform. Each tool in the activity editor, or Lesson Builder, is based on requests from educators working to build activities and books. Similarly, each course activity was tested with children to observe how they interacted with the games, what questions they asked, where they got stuck, what they gravitated towards, and how they felt while playing activity. Following numerous consultations with children, developers made adjustments to the activity templates. We also significantly shortened activity scripts because we learned that children prefer to experiment and decipher game play on their own, rather than being told how to play activities.

Testing the platform with teachers and observing learners play activities are fundamental, ongoing aspects of our work.

Blue Brick School is at a stage where we are ready to plan and implement pilot programs and research studies.  We are currently partnered with the non-profit organization 'School In a Box' in South Africa to implement a trial of our Foundational Literacy course in Sepedi language at an offline school in Mokopane, South Africa. The school trial will last 6 weeks, ending mid-June 2023, and is being done with grant funding from Innovation Edge. For the trial, we will translate eight activities from the Foundational Literacy course into Sepedi and train one teacher, who will facilitate thirty minutes of play time on tablets three times a week for children. 

The focus of the pilot study is on feasibility. We aim to understand implementation challenges and how teachers view the program. In September 2023, Innovation Edge will present our study findings to a panel of investors to pitch for larger funding. With further funding, we will prioritize implementation of a quasi-experimental study that aims to identify the relationship between children's early literacy learning outcomes and the Blue Brick School tablet-based e-learning program. With further funding, we plan to expand Blue Brick School to support additional South African languages.

Considering that South Africa placed last out of fifty countries on the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) (Howie, et. al. 2017), we expect funders to show interest in supporting literacy innovations in the country. We anticipate the opportunity to scale Blue Brick School in South Africa if we are able to demonstrate increased literacy outcomes.

Apart from impact data, we also want to integrate assessment games into the Foundational Literacy Course to generate formative data on literacy skills development. We would benefit from expert input on evolving our approach for gamified literacy assessments.

Finally, we are ready to obtain teacher feedback on the platform and want to understand how teachers respond to the idea of using Blue Brick School as a vehicle for enhancing learning in the classroom.  Since the platform is designed to equip teachers with activity and book authoring tools, we want to find out what aspects of the platform teachers feel comfortable using, whether they view the platform favorably, and the likelihood that they will customize, translate, or create activities.

1. Does the Blue Brick School tablet-based Sepedi Foundational Literacy Course increase early literacy outcomes for Sepedi speaking children in South Africa?

2. What benefits and challenges do teachers in the US, India, and South Africa perceive with respect to using Blue Brick School's activity creation and customization tools to support learning in their classrooms?

3. How should we design gamified formative learning assessments to track learning outcomes on the Blue Brick School platform?

We are eager to work with LEAP Project Fellows to create the design of a quasi-experimental study that measures the impact of Blue Brick School's Sepedi course on Sepedi speaking children's literacy scores in South Africa.  Our first desired output is a research design document that recommends how many schools and children to include in the study, the selection process for study participants, refined research questions, a statistical analysis plan for the study results, assessment tools to measure learning outcomes, and detailed methods for conducting the research. 

The second output would be support to conduct a survey with teachers in the US, India, and South Africa that captures their feedback on our current platform, their perceptions about the usefulness of the platform and Blue Brick School course content, and their motivation to use Blue Brick School's tablet-based e-learning program with their students. 

Third, we would like LEAP Project Fellows to review our current Foundational Literacy Course and advise us on how to design formative literacy assessments that check for learning outcomes mastery as children progress through course activities.  We need guidance on designing the assessments and using assessment scores in order to address learning variability. More specifically, we would like to differentiate the sequence of course activities for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners.

Our plan is to put the outputs developed through the LEAP Project into action by conducting the research studies and building gamified assessments on our platform.

Our ability to demonstrate Blue Brick School's impact through a full fledged quasi-experimental study will likely attract the interest of funders who want to support evidence-based interventions. We will incorporate the quasi-experimental study design into a proposal for further funding from Innovation Edge in South Africa.

For the teacher survey study in the US, India, and South Africa, we would ideally spend the first four weeks of the LEAP Project sprint designing the survey, the second month administering the survey, and the third month analyzing the survey results.  Once we have these study results, we will write a report and make the results available on our website, share the results with our network of partners, donors, and implementation partners, and use the results to define next steps for evolving our platform. This survey will be critical for defining our future steps as an organization. We will make adjustments to our strategy and platform based on what we learn from the survey.

The guidance we receive for designing formative literacy assessments will be used to build the assessments on our platform.  We currently have the capability to easily create the assessments. However, we are unclear about how to design effective assessments that will demonstrate learning outcomes.

Short-term outcomes:

1. Organizational Learning: The short-term goal of the LEAP Project sprint is to increase understanding about how to design pilot programs and impact studies within our team. We will gain new skills, refine our research questions, and develop a deeper understanding of problems and opportunities in building and implementing Blue Brick School.

2. Assessment Activities and Research Tools Development: During the 12-week sprint, the aim is to make significant progress in creating gamified literacy assessments on the BBS platform and to produce research tools for data collection. This could involve prototyping assessment activities, field testing research tools, and iterating on research methods and data analysis plans. The short-term outcome is to have a tangible prototype of assessment games as well as  a research design that captures the impact and feasibility of Blue Brick School.

3. Teacher and Learner Engagement: Another short-term objective is to actively solicit feedback from teachers and learners to gauge their response to what BBS offers. This will provide valuable insights for determining our strategic priorities, expansion plans, and addressing concerns. Effective teacher and learner engagement will help inform what is working well and what we should do differently.

Long-term outcomes:

1. Achieving Scale: The ultimate goal of measuring impact is to successfully scale BBS with more learners in communities with low literacy rates. Achieving scale requires that we register high numbers of educators globally who are motivated to create new content on BBS. Doing so would expand our platform's library of quality educational e-learning activities and books.  Long-term outcomes involve registering millions of teachers to use BBS for content creation and to support classroom learning.

2. Impact and Value Creation: Over the long term, the desired outcome is to see BBS deliver measurable impact and increase literacy rates in multilingual contexts. We expect research study results and data generated from use of the BBS platform to show how quality e-learning has the potential to increase children's learning outcomes. 

3. Continuous Improvement: We expect the LEAP Project sprint to also contribute to a culture of continuous improvement within BBS. The long-term outcome is to establish a feedback loop, allowing for ongoing iterations and refinements to our platform based on user feedback, educational market changes, and emerging technologies. Continuous improvement ensures that the BBS platform remains relevant and adapts to evolving needs.