Children today are digital natives, having frequent access to digital devices. However, there are un-met needs in the market for education and entertainment, both at home and at school as the offer for high quality educational apps is limited and expensive. Parents and educators are concerned about this and are actively searching for better alternatives.
To help resolve these issues, Smile and Learn places technology in service of education with the mission of helping children from the ages of 2 to 12, learn while having fun. Like North American educational philosopher John Dewey, we believe that “if we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow”.
We have developed the Smart Library, a single platform of interactive games and stories that leverages technology in a unique way. The Smart Library is multilingual, it can be used at home and at school and provides smart recommendations to the children and their educators thanks to an advanced recommendation system using machine learning and collaborative filtering technologies. We offer the Library for free at all schools, so children can access high quality material. We put a special focus on bridging the gap by making our Library special needs friendly, adding specific features that can be tailored to the needs of these children.
We are moving forward to make the Smart Library a global state-of-the-art product by scaling it up and developing advocacy campaigns to spread word of mouth. With the support of the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 SME instrument, we have accomplished 4 main goals:
• Develop new content reaching a total of 150 games/stories and 140 videos, to cover all multiple intelligences, including new features and technologies (e.g. virtual reality).
• Implement the recommendation model’s full potential.
• Make the Library 100% special needs friendly.
• Roll out dissemination exercise across international markets.
