New Orleans(US)  June 28, 2018 – The Amrita Learning App, developed by the Amrita CREATE division of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, has been  short listed as one of  five  contestants vying  for the $ million Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE presented by the Dollar General Literacy Foundation.
The  prize is a global competition challenging teams to develop reading apps for android devices. Winning teams are measured by the increase in literacy skills among participating adult learners.
Led by Dr. Prema Nedungadi,  a  team of educators and developers have created a personalized learning app along with culturally appropriate e-content linked to life skills.The Amrita Learning App was developed by the Amrita CREATE team at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, housed at the Amritapuri campus in Kerala, India. A team of 18 among Amrita CREATE's 40 plus team members developed the app. Amrita Learning/CREATE is one of five finalists announced at the 2018 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans. Each team was awarded $100K for advancing.
|Amrita CREATE's research is focused on developing educational technology to address the needs of the underserved populations, wherever they may be.
Says Prema: “Our team is thrilled to be selected as a finalist in Adult Literacy XPRIZE. We believe that reading is one of the golden keys that can break the cycle of dependence, depression and incarceration. Hope is only a word in many communities. We are grateful to know that real hope may be delivered widely now, as wide distribution of finalists' apps will be granted to finalists in this competition.”
The Amrita Learning App provides engaging, multi-modal instruction for the alphabetic level up to the 5th grade reading level. There is substantial Spanish language support throughout the app; games and a high-resolution Picture Dictionary support the main curriculum. True and fictional passages are designed specifically for adults, supported by human voice audio, and feature topics and characters that have courage, persistence and humor. We believe this educational approach will engage and uplift our readers, so they may persist until they succeed.”
The Adult Literacy XPRIZE aims to dramatically change the way the United States meets the needs of the 36 million adults across the nation with low literacy skills by tackling the largest obstacles to achieving basic literacy – access, retention and scale.A $3M grand prize will be awarded to the team with the best performance across all adult learners over a 15-month, 12,000-person field test, currently ongoing in Los Angeles, Dallas and Philadelphia and concluding in October 2018. A panel of expert judges will analyze the results and the winner will be announced in early 2019. Two $1M Achievement Prizes will also be awarded to the two teams with the best performance in each of the two key demographic groups: native English speakers and English language learners.
More information about Amrita CREATE