Tag: development

Tags: click-to-donate, development, philanthropy 2.0, social change, Web-native projects for social change, world food programme, Add more tags...,

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Every click counts: this is what they surely think at FreeRice. This project, run be the United Nations' World Food Programme and supported by Harvard's Berkman Centre, could be labelled "click to donate".

The term is by now fairly widely used: the changemakers network Care2 dedicates an entire section to it, named in fact Click2Donate: several websites, search engines and, increasingly, Facebook applications, populate the Web of "clicking for good".

I am not trying to make the case here for the disappearance of any form of activism and collective action in light of a sort of easy-to-click, automated philanthropy. Rather, I am only painting the picture of a sophisticated and at the same time sustainable use of the fundamental element of human-Web interaction as we know it, the click. 

 

 

 

FreeRice is one of the most established examples of this particular category, but not simply or its affiliation with UN or Harvard. It is a simple, yet not lame, very nice concept blending quiz gaming, learning outcomes, basic sponsorhip and progressive social change through food donation.

 

 

 

By entering the site, you got instantly faced withthe first question of a quiz game involving wording (English grammar basically), language learning or recently introduced subjects like art, geography of maths. Select your favourite subject and start answering questions.

For every correct answer your score will increase and so your level after a while, but way more importantly 10 grains of rice will be donated through UN's World Food Programme. Yes, 10 grains of rice, for free. Apparently more than 71 billions since 2007. Not bad.

Who funds that? Simply, from the site: "This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on this site".

 

 

 

I find the gaming/learning outcome still rather weak, poorly advertised and a bit clumsy in ots objectives. But I do love the idea.It seems to be much improvable, as mostly focused on the 5-spare-minutes kind of gaming..

 

Any suggestion is here welcome? How would you enrich this model? Gaming Competitions? Incentives? More visual? Partnership with game-makers? Stronger, branded sponsorships? More explicit in the targets?Simply more grand in its learning or entertaining objective?

Perhaps, these could be a good starting point for other attractive options..

Tags: development, education, philanthropy 2.0, social change, Web-native projects for social change, Add more tags...,

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Here we are, third step in our Web-native social change review series:EducationGeneration.org.

 

 

 

As a project born from Global Agents for Change, a California-based "social change catalyst, driving sustainable solutions to global poverty and inspiring youth to create a better world", EducationGeneration is "dedicated to providing access to education for students around the globe" (from EducationGeneration.org).

 

Beta launched in fall 2008, EducationGeneration has already funded 130 scholarships and raised over $30,000.

 

 

 

As in several other known platforms across the Web (think about Kiva.org), here we witness the Web enabling a process that closely resembles child adoption: users are asked to make their donation directly to an individual, in this case deciding to invest in that boy or girl's education.

 

The process is again as simple as it gets: users browse students' profiles on the EducationGeneration website, pick a student to support, click on the donate button (minimum is 20 dollars)...that's it!:money is processed by PayPal and 100% of it (if we exclude PayPal fees) goes directly to the chosen student's personal education. This is possible thanks to fairly advantageous partnerhips with local institutions, one of them for example being the Canadian SEED. There are not many information about this passage on the site and we will further deepen the matter in the next days.

 

 

 

Information about schools and their costs, partnering institutions in loco, the student' educational stage and even some individual notes on her or his favourite topics and skills, are included.

 

Some of the best assets of EducationGeneration appear to be:

Tags: development, education, one laptop per child, open source, sim city, Add more tags...,

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I have always appreciated, among the many, those games who could be able to genuinely entertain and, at the same time, teach you something. Stuff like "Civilization" and "Colonization", for example, but several others could be mentioned.

 

I had never thought about SimCity as one of the most "educational". Well, I guess I just couldn't see its potentialities.

SimCity is just two times good...Able to entertain -without the need of violence, speed or amazing graphics - millions of people through its addictive nature years ago, able to be used - and furtherly improved - for educational purpose now.

 

 

 

That's what ArsTechnica was explaining a couple of months ago.

Electronic Arts - finally -, pushed by Don Hoskins, donated the original Sim City game to the "One Laptop per Child" project, to be distributed among schoolchildren in developing countries. 

Hoskins, who attempted to obtain Sim City few years ago after its ten-year distribution contract expired, will now be able to fulfil his original goal: reinventing the game for academic uses.  

 

The most excting part, IMHO, comes from thefact that the Open Source community will now be able to renovate Sim City and - my favorite sentence - take it to new educational directions.

 

The game is also available from EA website to be played...online.

 

Update: What classic game developers have always dreamt has now turned into reality. Sim City...Ops...Micropolis (title changed, EA requirements) source code is finally available here. Thanks to Don Hopkins.