ALIG – Children Learning in Real Time
January 2020
By Lucia Valente
The ALIG team in India shared these videos with us. It is beautiful to see young children in remote regions of Eastern India working with advanced technology to learn English
Loss of Generality began our collaboration with ALIG in mid-2019. It is very special for the LoG team to see our technology applied in this way.
Just like LoG, ALIG is committed to education. Their motto is
Only the Educated are Free
And we, at LOG, believe that top quality education is a human right. We strive to make our education technology available to all students who have a desire to learn.
What is most fascinating about these videos – showing children learning English – is that the same customized solutions/technology, using visual aids, pictures and graphics, is used in undergraduate and graduate courses in Ireland, US and Canada. Our customized modules, developed on Wolfram Cloud, are used in India at government elementary schools, teaching poor children basic English language vocabulary!
The school has little electricity – enough to run a wireless modem.
Inexpensive mobile phones and tablets are used in place of unaffordable PCs! In villages in India we see, in real time, the power of LoG/Wolfram mobile computing. LoG provided the entire development and deployment and teacher training gratis.
Teachers are being trained to develop custom education modules, in these videos the modules are designed and deployed for English Language; and in the furure we may deploy modules for mathematics
While the modules may look trivial, they are not.
- The modules use advanced Machine Learning to sort out the multiple-choice answers e.g. colour based questions.
- Colour Distance/Similarity algorithm used to paint the images with particular colour regions.
- Edit Distance used for handling spelling errors.
An. important element of LoG’s design is unlimited practice. The young students can practice as many times as required in order to learn the subject matter at hand. The learning is based on exposure to the material and practice – not on blind memorization.