EduLajar
Ankur - student Computer Science
Learning the alphabet while playing a game. That is the solution of students Ankur and Nikolaos for a school in Malaysia that has to close its doors because of the pandemic. At the school there are children with learning difficulties. In the rural areas there are hardly any resources available for home education. Therefore, the two students are developing EduLaJar, a game app that teaches children to read and write on their parents' smartphones.
The game app EduLaJar helps children to read and write in a playful way
Homeschooling during the pandemic is not always easy. How do you ensure that young children with learning difficulties, for whom there are no alternatives such as laptops or extra courses, can continue to learn? Indeed, by making smart use of a tool to which they do have access: their parents' smartphone.
Ankur and Nikolas develop the app during their course ICT4D in the Field. They work closely together with two Malaysian students and one Ghanaian student. They receive the teaching materials from the local teacher and together they design a game where children can learn the alphabet and basic words in a playful way. At the same time, the app introduces children to technology at a young age.
This study project was part of the elective course ICT4D in the Field. This is an elective course of the masters Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Information Sciences. The course is taught in collaboration with Centre for International Cooperation (CIS-VU) and is part of the joint education between VU Amsterdam, UDS (University for Development Studies) Ghana and UNIMAS (University Malaysia Sarawak). The course is about "community service learning". During this course, VU students work together with students from the other universities on a project. The students from the other universities who participated in this project are Sim Keng Wai and Nur Syazwani (from UNIMAS) and Muonah Callister (from UDS). The theme of the EduLaJar project is "Artificial Intelligence in and for the Global South."
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