Layne Jackson (known as Matuka during her teaching time at Children’s House) has just received an amazing honor.
A Colorado team is one of 15 winners to share in $1 million awarded by a Denver-based organization as part of a new contest recognizing innovative efforts benefitting children from birth to 3 years old.
The Boulder-based team will receive $80,000 for a project that helps little kids acquire language, thinking, and social-emotional skills using a cell phone app inside a stuffed animal.
Gary Community Investments, which gives grants and makes for-profit investments to benefit low-income children and families, announced the winners of the Early Childhood Innovation Prize on Tuesday afternoon. (Gary Community Investments, through the Piton Foundation, is a Chalkbeat funder.)
The Colorado team that won prize money developed a tool called MindScribe. It works like this. An adult slips a cell phone with a special application into the belly of a stuffed zebra. The app prompts the child to explain what they are doing or making and asks follow-up questions, such as “What happened next?” and “Why?”
MindScribe founder Layne Hubbard, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, said her work as a teacher at Boulder’s Children’s House Preschool inspired the project.
“I thought back to storytelling and how powerfully the children’s original stories catalyzed growth, development, and connectedness,” she wrote via email. “I realized that I wanted to scale this opportunity to reach young children across diverse early childhood communities, especially those which are multilingual, low-income, or affected by trauma or disability.”
One little girl who stars in a MindScribe’s demonstration video describes her crayon drawing of a garden — and her fictional protagonist’s desire to change “boring weather” — to the MindScribe zebra for seven minutes.
Early Childhood Innovation Prize
The first few years of a child’s life lay the foundation for future success, but too many young children aren’t reaching their full potential because existing approaches to early learning and development are not sufficiently addressing today’s challenges.
To build a pipeline of potentially transformative early childhood investment opportunities, GCI partnered with OpenIDEO on the Early Childhood Innovation Prize, which launched in fall 2017 and brought together hundreds of innovators and experts to collaboratively answer the urgent question: How might we maximize every child’s potential during their first three years of life?
The Prize sourced ideas from new innovators with early concepts in development, early stage innovators with at least one year prototyping or piloting experience and advanced innovators with more than three years experience, and it asked them to focus on three opportunity areas: improving early experiences so they are healthy and constructive; supporting parents and families to give children the best start; and leveraging neighborhoods and communities to create safe, engaging early learning environments. Ideas that fell outside of these areas but were particularly novel or breakthrough were also considered.
The Colorado team that won prize money developed a tool called MindScribe. It works like this. An adult slips a cell phone with a special application into the belly of a stuffed zebra. The app prompts the child to explain what they are doing or making and asks follow-up questions, such as “What happened next?” and “Why?”