Blue Brick School

Across the world, 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% of learners in low- and middle-income countries are taught in a language they do not understand. In real terms, that amounts to about 370 million youth who understand and use one of the world's other 7,000+ active languages.

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 or other more mainstream languages early, combined with resource constraints and poorly informed language education policies, coalesce to deprive children of local language-learning resources. As stated in the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report (2016), "In many countries, large numbers of children are taught and take tests in languages that they do not speak at home, hindering the early acquisition of critically important reading and writing skills. Their parents may lack literacy skills or familiarity with official languages used in school, which can then reinforce gaps in learning opportunities between minority and majority language groups."

As literacy development is crucial to human development, this education gap for speakers of non-mainstream languages then creates a ripple effect throughout all stages of life, creating a clear disadvantage in accessing continued education, finding meaningful employment, leading a healthy life, and combatting the challenges of poverty and discrimination.

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. Many require a paid subscription. Further, most e-learning content is available online, but cannot be accessed in offline contexts. If we are to truly reach those in need and help minimize the literacy development gap, we must invest in innovative solutions that promote equity and inclusion.

Blue Brick School's mission is to enable quality e-learning for every child in their native language. Learning variability was a key driver behind Blue Brick School's (BBS) design. We wanted children to have choices while learning, so that they could feel motivated 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 without cost 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 and literacy experts 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 full course is currently available in English and Spanish with some content available in Tamil and Sepedi, as well.

When educators login, they can either build activities and books from scratch, or they can browse content in a global library that contains all standards-aligned activities and books. The BBS team created the Foundational Literacy course activities and sourced books 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.

Apart from building and customizing content, educators can also compile a playlist of activities to create a course. After adding students to make class lists, the teacher can assign each class to take any course of her choice. We also 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. Learners can repeat activities until proficiency is reached, or practice more activities as assigned by their teacher.

Working with international partners in bringing youth and especially educators in countries worldwide access to Blue Brick School through tablet devices or other technology, we endeavor to add many new languages to our course content and to reach those youth who are falling behind because of linguistic accessibility issues and/or are being left out of education systems entirely.

Our platform targets tech-savvy teachers worldwide who have the skills and motivation to create, edit, and use BBS content in their classrooms. In addition, we target children in countries with low literacy rates to play BBS content through e-learning programs. All our activities align with learning standards. Our initial focus is on developing content for preschool through grade 2 learners. As an organization we value research, collaboration, inclusivity, and educational quality.

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. Moreover, it is important for children to see themselves represented in what they read and hear. BBS tools enable easy modifications so that minority language learners can see their identities affirmed on screens.

Visions Global Empowerment was founded as a nonprofit in 2003 and formally incorporated in 2008. Over the course of the past 2+ decades, we have successfully invested more than $23 million in education programs for youth affected by poverty, conflict, disability, and discrimination and have positively impacted the lives of more than 55,000 people. We are a team of mostly volunteers who are deeply committed to the ideals of social justice, poverty eradication, sustainability, and the transformative power of education. We have ample experience working in complex environments implementing literacy development initiatives and other efforts to create access to quality education for youth who would otherwise not have such opportunities. In so doing, we have learned a great deal about what works. More importantly, we have learned how to work in challenging environments and with local partners and stakeholders. Visions has always prioritized local leadership and agency, rather than imposing outside ideas or systems.

With our Blue Brick School system having been successfully trialed already amongst children in schools and in after-school centers in both urban and rural contexts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, India, and South Africa, we have a proven solution that holds great potential to benefit countless more children globally, provided we are able to secure the funding and partnerships we need to ramp up.

The Team Lead defines the overall strategic direction of Blue Brick School. This role determines organizational priorities, fundraises, writes grants, plans and manages the organization's operating budget, approves hiring decisions, and liaises with project donors. The Team Lead also leads day-to-day operations, including partnership management for Blue Brick School e-learning programs, and supervises content development. The Team Lead works closely with any technology consultants to decide upon development tasks and priorities. The Team Lead also works closely with any education team members, consultants, or volunteers in creating Blue Brick School content in order to identify technical improvements needed to improve the functionality and user experience of the platform. The Team Lead must also coordinate regularly with any implementing partners to ensure proper management and oversight, to manage quality, and to troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

The Blue Brick School platform is at a stage whereby the foundation has been set. We absolutely have further ambitions to develop it, both in terms of various functionalities of the system itself and of the content & learning resources available. We envision adding further tools and templates for teachers to create and share learning content and to manage students; further "rewards" for students to incentivize progress; expansion of language offerings to any language; specific adaptations for creating literacy-learning content for children with disabilities (such as the deaf or the visually impaired); etc. To do so will require further significant investment.

However, the platform is at a stage in which it is essentially ready to launch. We have content available in 4 languages currently - English, Spanish, Tamil, and Sepedi. We continue to add new content in Tamil (Indian) everyday and have plans in the works to adapt much of the Indian Tamil content into Sri Lankan Tamil, as well.

Across Guatemala, Nicaragua, India, and South Africa, we have so far been able to reach and collect data from about 500 children. These trials have deliberately been narrow in scope in order to get qualitative feedback on curriculum and learning resources and to troubleshoot any technical issues that may arise. These trials have been paramount to our ability to improve the system, which will ensure a smoother rollout as we look to new partnerships and next steps. Now 5+ years into this endeavor, we are ready to move on to the next stage of our development and to bring this opportunity to many more communities.

Our goal is simple -- to enable quality e-learning for every child in their native language. We are eager to collaborate with partners who can help invest in our continued development and operations, as well as partners who can help us roll out programs in communities worldwide. With the proper resources and team, we believe we can bring Blue Brick School to virtually any community throughout the globe and be able to make an impact. Our dream is to build our library of content in as many languages as possible, with an emphasis on minority languages, and to then reach those communities that are linguistically not well represented (or not represented at all) within systems of formal education. As such, having partners that share in our ambition to make literacy development content and other learning resources available and accessible in minority languages would be a great asset to us, as well as partners that understand technological hardware and the logistics of utilizing technology in both online and offline settings.

Visions Global Empowerment currently has 1 full-time employee (myself - Gregory Buie). We hire contractors as needed for further technological or curricular development or maintenance. Currently, we have 1 such contractor working with us on a regular basis. We also have 1 temporary U.S.-based intern and several volunteers, including Visions Co-Founder Dr. Meera Pathmarajah who worked full-time on the development of Blue Brick School for several years.

We first began working on developing Blue Brick School in December 2018 by doing our research and building out the general framework of the platform. In the years that followed, we scaled up our efforts considerably. Now that the platform is essentially built and ready to be utilized in any context, we have pared back our team and are seeking larger scale funding and partners to propel us to more widespread usage.

As all of the work done by Visions Global Empowerment over the past 20+ years has been in supporting communities affected by poverty, conflict, disability, and discrimination, a commitment to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are inherent to everything that we do. This is certainly the case with the team that we have built over the years, as set by our two Co-Founders, one of whom is a woman of color and the other of whom identifies as LGBT, including with Blue Brick School. We have always valued and prioritized diversity in our leadership, including our Board of Directors and staff, bringing on people of different backgrounds who represent and/or understand the diverse contexts in which we work.

Visions' model of international development is also one that prioritizes building the capacity of local civil society itself, recognizing that local communities and local leaders have a strong understanding of the issues and of the opportunities to support those in need. We believe in affirming their voices, equipping them with the resources and knowledge that they need, and supporting them in their journey to improve their own communities. As such, Visions has empowered and worked hand-in-hand as allies in development with local leaders in the countries where we work or have worked, including Sri Lanka, India, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Kenya in establishing their own nonprofit organizations and taking agency over creating and implementing innovative poverty-fighting and education measures. Currently, Visions has just one full-time U.S. staff but supports nearly 85 staff abroad through our in-country partners. We also have an Equal Employment Opportunity policy as part of our formal bylaws that affirms our commitment to diversity and non-discrimination in hiring.

One of our earliest efforts as an organization, which to this day remains one of our flagship programs, was in creating a youth leadership and life skills curriculum, which we vetted and developed over many years through conducting trainings in various cultures and settings, with the driving idea of empowering some of the most marginalized and oppressed youth to realize their innate potential and build a better future for themselves and the world. To-date, over 8,000 youth and teachers have directly participated in such trainings, in which the values and ambitions of D.E.I. are well represented and discussed throughout.

In all aspects of management and growth we have always sought to build a community and a culture that reflects the diversity and reach of our programs, be it at the Board, Advisory Board, staff, or volunteer levels, and to ensure that all voices are represented and all people feel they have equal agency, respect, and opportunity within the work that we do.

Blue Brick School has two core objectives. First, we endeavor 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 in any language and for any demographic.

Our second objective is to increase under-resourced children’s access to quality e-learning by partnering with funders and organizations to enable online and offline tablet-based e-learning programs. The Blue Brick School school management system allows teachers to assign personalized courses while also tracking learner progress.

As Visions Global Empowerment and Blue Brick School are both entirely nonprofit in nature, we have no interest whatsoever in making a profit. The "pay off" in doing this work is in helping children, especially those who are living in vulnerable, marginalized, and impoverished settings and who are learning in a language that is not their mother tongue, to access quality education, develop crucial literacy skills, and eventually help break the cycle of poverty for themselves and their families.

At the core of our business development model is establishing partnerships with other stakeholders who are committed to transforming literacy development for the large demographic of children who learn in a language that is not their own. With a major initial investment in this project already having occurred, we have a strong foundation upon which to continue building and a product in-hand that can be customized and rolled out in virtually any community globally. With your support, we are ready to take this to the next level!

Blue Brick School is a nonprofit endeavor of U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization Visions Global Empowerment that seeks to provide free access to our learning platform and resources for teachers, youth, parents, and other interested parties globally. We seek to sustain and grow our operations through securing grant funding and through the establishment of formal partnerships with various stakeholders, including governments, funding agencies, civil society partners, global organizations, and private donors.

Between 2018 and 2022, Blue Brick School’s development was funded by a single philanthropist. Funding from this philanthropist came to an end in December 2022 due to donor fatigue. In late 2022, Visions India (a subsidiary of Visions USA) obtained a $50,000 grant to translate Blue Brick School’s English Foundational Literacy course into Tamil. We have also partnered with a South African nonprofit, School in a Box, to implement a Sepedi-language pilot program of Blue Brick School in a rural setting. This $9,000 pilot is being funded through competitive grant funding awarded by Innovation Edge.

Visions is currently dipping into our reserve funding as we apply for grants and strive to sustain Blue Brick School's development. Our current annual operating budget is quite minimal though at about $15,000. It is our intention to secure significant funding in the year ahead, however, in order to further build the platform and our content, expand the library of resources and content in other languages, and roll out programs in communities throughout the world in partnership with other stakeholders and investors.