According to the Associated Press, some 20,000 pupils across 213 schools in the city have been targeted by the initiative, with that figure set to grow to 43,000 – 100 percent of its students aged four to 14 – by 2013. The children will be given t-shirts with locator microchips embedded in them that will detect if they are within the vicinity of their school at the start of the day. If they are, parents will be sent a text message notifying them of their arrival, and if not they will be updated after 20 minutes of classes starting that their child is not in school. Vitoria da Conquista secretary Coriolano Moraes explained that the scheme aims to cut the number of truants in the city: “We noticed that many parents would bring their children to school but would not see if they actually entered the building because they always left in a hurry to get to work on time. They would always be surprised when told of the number times their children skipped class.” The city has invested USD 670,000 to design, test and produce the tagged shirts.

While it seems to be a fail-proof way to ensure that parents know if their children are in school or not, there may naturally be concerns about privacy. The potential to adapt this idea into other sectors however — to keep track of employees for example — is enormous. An idea to bring into your school or institution?

Website: www.pmvc.com.br
Contact: secompmvc@gmail.com

Spotted by: Parul Rohatgi

Designed for use in the workplace, schools and charities, the Youtopia app enables users and their organizations to keep track of activities and gain rewards for completing them. Both the employee and company, student and school, volunteer and charity begin by downloading the app onto their smartphones. Either user can set up a task on the website and, once completed, the participant marks that they have achieved the task. Their organization then confirms that this is the case and points are rewarded and tallied, with badges being earned for reaching particular milestones. These points can be exchanged for gift vouchers, tickets or discounts. Organizations can use the data to see how individuals in large groups are performing, and the website also acts as a social network, enabling participants to show off their achievements. Users and organizations can interact with each other within the app, meaning that universities can team up with charities to set up projects, for example. The video below has more information on how the app works:

Gamification is now being widely used as a tool to improve people’s desire to be active, whether at home or in their local community. One to partner with?

Website: www.youtopia.com
Contact: info@youtopia.com

Spotted by: Simeon Schnappe

Accepting that online gaming is one of the most popular forms of procrastination among those in college, the platform aims to turn timewasting pursuits into more worthwhile opportunities for profit. Featuring games such as poker and quizzes, brands can sponsor tournaments by providing funds that will go towards educational grants, or donations to charities, for students who win. The idea is to give young people a better reason for playing, while enabling businesses to show off their benevolence and gain favor with the youth demographic. Grantoo says that a Cone study has shown 83 percent of Americans want brands to support a cause, and the new gaming platform hopes to offer a way for them to do this.

The site will be going into beta testing from 25 March with its first tournament launching fully soon after that. Brands: one to partner with to increase your exposure and boost public perception?

Website: www.grantoo.org
Contact: www.twitter.com/grantooorg

GoSoapBox enables teachers to set up ‘events’ – such as multiple-choice questions, open quizzes or opinion polls – and then provides those teachers with results from each student once they have answered using the platform. Whereas tutors would traditionally pose a question and ask a pupil to answer out loud in class, the interface is designed to provide an engaging way for students to interact with the lesson material while anonymizing the answering process to dispel students’ fears of answering incorrectly. Students can also choose from a list of questions already posed by the teacher in order to rank the areas they want to go over by priority. The platform features a ‘confusion barometer’ as well, with which pupils can inform class leaders if they do not fully understand a topic. The real-time data is presented in a graphic way so that teachers can easily see how their class is faring. The video below explains the platform in greater detail:

As we’ve seen before on Springwise, web-based mobile technology is increasingly becoming an essential part of the classroom. Others involved in education, what about you?

Website: www.gosoapbox.com
Contact: support@gosoapbox.com

Spotted by: Florent Lesauvage

The college’s primary objective is to offer courses that are fun and engaging as well as educative, based around Jacques Delors’ four pillars of education – increasing knowledge, turning ideas into activity, being a part of the global community and having meaningful experiences. Offering courses in creative areas, such as advertising, sports journalism and professional cooking, alongside more business-minded options such as digital literacy and consumer behaviour, the teaching is designed to be highly interactive, with the ideas of students being integrated into lesson plans as much as those of the tutor.

Through its Project 1:1, Perestroika also teaches a free class to a child from a disadvantaged background for every student that signs up. The video below has more details on the project:

We’ve seen countless examples of crowdsourcing being used to tap the collective brain across a wide range of industries on Springwise in the past, but this is the first time we’ve ever seen the model applied to education. Where else could the power of the crowds be used to shake up traditional models?

Website: www.perestroika.com.br
Contact: perestroika@perestroika.com.br

Spotted by: Erica Oliveira

Trail Shuttle “empowers users to achieve the desired learning outcomes by enabling them to customize one-of-a-kind, indoor and/or outdoor learning trails.” What that means, in essence, is that Trail Shuttle promotes self-directed learning via individualized, experiential paths. Three components, in turn, are involved to make that goal possible: a Web-based toolkit for creating learning programs as well as a mobile app that allows students to explore and experience those programs and a monitoring app that lets teachers track students’ progress. Included in the mobile app for students are an augmented reality way-finder and code scanner; quizzes to test the student’s learning; chat capabilities; and the ability to check in at “hotspots” and complete specific tasks, according to a report on SGEntrepreneurs.com, which also notes that some 16 Singapore schools are now participating in the program. Trail Shuttle’s Web-based toolkit works on the Chrome and Firefox 6 browsers, while its free exploration and monitoring app runs on iOS 4.3 or later.

Similar in many ways to the tablet-based SquareCrumbs project we covered last year — also from Singapore — Trail Shuttle looks ripe for emulation around the globe. Education entrepreneurs: one to tailor and adapt to your own local audience?

Website: www.rockmoon.sg
Contact: joe@reload.com.sg

Spotted by: Pek Chew Lian

Roughly the size of a credit card, Raspberry Pi is designed to plug into a TV or to link with a touch screen to create a low-cost tablet. The device features a 700MHz ARM11 processor along with 128MB or 256MB of SDRAM and open software including Fedora Linux, Iceweasel, KOffice and Python. Also included are composite and HDMI video output, a SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot, an optional integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller, and USB 2.0. Perhaps best of all, however, is that it’s expected to be priced at USD 35 for a system with wifi, or USD 25 for one without. “It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video,” the UK-based project explains. “We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.”

Once the Raspberry Pi goes into production — currently slated for January — its developers expect it to make an impact in both the developed and developing worlds. Education and tech-minded entrepreneurs: one to get involved in?

Website: www.raspberrypi.org
Contact: info@raspberrypi.org

Spotted by: Marko Balabanovic

Users of ReadCube can create an article library instantly, importing their existing PDFs in a single step as well as downloading in one click any related articles they want from PubMed, Google Scholar or publisher websites. ReadCube will automatically identify the author, title, and journal citation information for every article, and has the ability to search for text across the entire library. The platform also enables users to annotate articles with in-line comments, highlights and sticky notes, and can import citation information to EndNote or other citation software. In addition, ReadCube recommends new, related articles every day, helping users stay on top of what’s new in their field. The video below explains ReadCube in more detail:

Thanks to a partnership between Labtiva, Digital Science and Nature Publishing Group, readers of articles on Nature.com can now enjoy similar functionality from within their browser. Ideas here for other online publishers?

Website: www.readcube.com
Contact: info@labtiva.com

The Kickboard web-based software helps teachers and school administrators “collect and analyze academic and behavioral performance efficiently and in real time so that they can make appropriate and timely interventions,” in the company’s own words. To begin using the software, teachers input scores to track students’ mastery of skills and lessons. Academic dashboards then pinpoint the skills and lessons that need to be retaught, as well as the students in need of tutoring; a schoolwide dashboard, meanwhile, provides a bird’s-eye view of classroom performance. Then there’s Kickboard’s integrated “discipline management system”, which keeps a log of all disciplinary incidents or examples of good behavior and awards points accordingly. The points can then be converted into punishments or rewards by the school. The software also comes with a “school culture analysis” tool, which lets teachers compare the frequency of disciplinary incidents and positive behaviors by grade-level or student group. Data can be easily imported from commonly used educational systems, and there’s no installation fees or annual contracts required. Monthly subscriptions start at just USD 15 per teacher. In the video below, Drop the Chalk founder Jennifer Schnidman explains the premise in more detail:

Kickboard is currently running in 15 New Orleans charter schools; a student/parent portal is currently in the works, according to an Inc. report from earlier this year. Education-minded entrepreneurs: one to get involved in?

Website: www.kickboardforteachers.com
Contact: kickboard@dropthechalk.com

Spotted by: Matthew Smith

A group of a hundred students were selected via an interview process to work in SPELL — Singapore Polytechnic Entrepreneurship Living Lab — which opened in September. The store sells clothing and accessories under the brand name “Verve Avenue”, with stock largely sourced from Asian suppliers. Students are assigned a role — for example, buying or managing operations — according to their diploma, which also dictates the number of hours they are required to work in the store. Students are assessed and graded on their performance, which counts towards their diploma, and also have the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in textbooks to the real world. True to their “passion for innovation and creativity”, SPELL are partnering with Motorola to create a magic mirror which allows customers to see what they would look like in SPELL’s clothing, without actually having to try items on.

While learning business theory from textbooks is hugely valuable, putting it into real-life practice will help to deepen knowledge through experience. Not only that, but a concept like SPELL gives students a taste of entrepreneurship. Inspiration here for centers of learning around the world!

Website: www.changiairport.com/shopping-and-dining/shopping/spell or www.sp.edu.sg
Contact: feedback@changiairport.com

Spotted by: Katharina Kieck