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Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

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Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#21

Post by itdaniher »

Recovering olpc volunteer here. Happy to hear of your labors!

One of the concepts a related project explored was using live / persistent USB disks to preserve student ownership and facilitate unscheduled explorations.

Multiplexes hardware across students at different times, facilitating students using a consistent environment at home on old P4 desktops and at school on whatever's available.

Even large (32+GB) portable storage devices are available under $50.

Check out "sugar on a stick" and "open1to1" for related trains of thought.

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#22

Post by houssem_fat »

dlnb wrote: post #19

You should reach out to the folks at learningequality.org. They focus on totally offline use cases but have a huge global partnership network and could definitely give you hardware advice.

Thank you dlnb ! I really liked the idea, nice to know about it !! this will be very helpful !

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#23

Post by houssem_fat »

jlgaddis wrote: post #13

I would encourage you to forget about hardware and concentrate on the software and applications. Based on my experiences (I work for an ISP but we have a "sister" company that's an MSP that provides IT services to, among others, several K-12 schools in such rural areas), most of these schools either 1) already have available hardware (iPads, Chromebooks) due to existing 1:1 programs or 2) have decided to not (yet) pu…

Thank you jlgaddis ! Really, we don't try to be a hardware company, we just try to find a reasonable way to a child fo owning a device with internet access and 'reasonable' performance. Our freemium business model really didn't focus on such areas neither in hardware, if we found a hardware provider partner that offers affordable plans ( such as paying 5$ per month during a year instead of all), this will be great for us so we can focus only on software apps. In The zone that we target, they never used computers before, most use cellular phones or cheap smartphones but this is for parents not children.

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#25

Post by houssem_fat »

itdaniher wrote: post #21

Recovering olpc volunteer here. Happy to hear of your labors! One of the concepts a related project explored was using live / persistent USB disks to preserve student ownership and facilitate unscheduled explorations. Multiplexes hardware across students at different times, facilitating students using a consistent environment at home on old P4 desktops and at school on whatever's available. Even large (32+GB) portabl…

This is very interesting, Thank you daniher !! Sharing and portability are nice features and these systems are so important, as they have already a lot of pre-build tools. Still need a pc or a raspberry pi like system to read usb. But thanks again !

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#26

Post by houssem_fat »

patrickserrano wrote: post #16

If you're looking at any kind of volume, you should be able to get Chromebooks for under $100 direct from China. When I was at a K12 school about 3 years ago, our purchase of ~250 Chromebooks allowed us to knock nearly 25% off the per unit cost to get them down to ~$150/device. And that was going through a third-party that was white labeling the devices. The machines we ended up with were 2GB of RAM/16GB storage devi…

Thank you patrickserrano !! This is will be great if we establish an affordable plan with a 3 or 4 year engagement. We can support this if we found a partnership or an investment, that's will be a good option for better quality.

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#27

Post by sethish »

houssem_fat wrote: post #25
itdaniher wrote: post #21

Recovering olpc volunteer here. Happy to hear of your labors! One of the concepts a related project explored was using live / persistent USB disks to preserve student ownership and facilitate unscheduled explorations. Multiplexes hardware across students at different times, facilitating students using a consistent environment at home on old P4 desktops and at school on whatever's available. Even large (32+GB) portabl…

This is very interesting, Thank you daniher !! Sharing and portability are nice features and these systems are so important, as they have already a lot of pre-build tools. Still need a pc or a raspberry pi like system to read usb. But thanks again !

You can mount a USB stick on a phone. But a phone for each child would serve the same purpose.

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#28

Post by sethish »

houssem_fat wrote: post #14
kazishariar wrote: post #5

I think this is amazing, and credit should be given where credit is due. Are you basing your concept on learning management systems like moodle. Is that what you are? I know, you're probably so much more. But I need to ask, how do you organize content that's already available into bite-sized lessons easily digestible by children? And it's easy to get muddled into providing content, along with a medium for that conten…

Hello, Thank you kazishariar ! Right now, we are not using a special framework for managing system, Edx maybe our primary choice if we think about a all-in-one system. But instead, we decide to build apps by categories instead of building a generic one. We are focusing on the way we create content by subject. We started developing a story editor with basic images, texts, and sounds (so we can add effects in the story…

What you're doing sounds incredibly expensive in terms of developer hours. Are you certain you've explored the world of pre existing open content?

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#29

Post by jnbiche »

As you likely know, you will need to be very careful when developing web-based applications for the resource-constrained devices you mention. A typical bloated web app as made by most companies will often not run well in resource-constrained environments like many ARM SOCs. I would encourage you to approach the app design process with an extremely minimalist approach, striving to avoid libraries and use vanilla JS as much as possible, use tiny assets, and keep allocations to a minimum (maybe consider object pools for certain applications). If you use a minimal framework, Mithril JS might be a good choice, or domvm, or something similarly minimal. You probably want to stay away from React and Angular.

Re: Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones

#30

Post by mindhash »

houssem_fat wrote: post #23
jlgaddis wrote: post #13

I would encourage you to forget about hardware and concentrate on the software and applications. Based on my experiences (I work for an ISP but we have a "sister" company that's an MSP that provides IT services to, among others, several K-12 schools in such rural areas), most of these schools either 1) already have available hardware (iPads, Chromebooks) due to existing 1:1 programs or 2) have decided to not (yet) pu…

Thank you jlgaddis ! Really, we don't try to be a hardware company, we just try to find a reasonable way to a child fo owning a device with internet access and 'reasonable' performance. Our freemium business model really didn't focus on such areas neither in hardware, if we found a hardware provider partner that offers affordable plans ( such as paying 5$ per month during a year instead of all), this will be great fo…

Have you considered pre owned laptops from urban areas. You could try running a campaign if you haven't already.

I thought important thing in this setup is transparency. So if a particular user or teacher can not afford, you add them to a page. A donation can be old or pre owned laptop.

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