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The UNESCO estimates a 12% drop in world poverty if all children in developing countries have basic reading skills. “In poor places there are no good teachers. If they are there, they go to the cities. So that place remains uneducated for generations,” says Subhajit Roy, co-founder of Team Krishna. It is working on solving the world’s literacy problem by building a software through which children, on their own can gain basic reading and writing knowledge of alphabets and numbers.
In March 2015, Team Krishna was the first team, globally to accept the challenge of solving world illiteracy as part of the Global Learning XPRIZE Challenge. The team comprising of people from various walks of life, such as education experts, doctors, engineers and so on, from all across the country has come together to build this software. They plan to call it Gurukul when completed.
The software, which will ‘gamify’ learning will be highly interactive and use elements of machine learning. Using the kids’ attention to play, it will actually educate them. “We have named the technology as ‘intellifriend’. The software is your intelligent friend,” says the 29-year-old Subhajit.
They have invested immense time and resources in the research. So far, all the expenditure has been borne by them. Now they need money develop the software. Subhajit, a software engineer by profession says, “For engineering, we don’t need anybody. But for the creative part; for animation and graphics, we need help.” They are raising funds on Milaap to ensure that they can access quality resources.
