X Prize Pledges $15M for Software That Lets Children Teach Themselves

Peter Diamandis Ted S. Warren / AP

The X PRIZE Foundation, the brainchild of entrepreneur and futurist Peter Diamandis, is already working on everything from sending people to the moon, to cleaning up our oceans, to developing a real life Star Trek tricorder. And on Monday, the venerable non-profit announced another ambitious goal. It wants to bootstrap technology that will let the world’s children teach themselves to read and write.

The newly launched Global Learning X PRIZE is offering up $15 million to fund open source software that can remake education in the developing world. Ideally, Diamandis says, the X PRIZE team is looking for software that is artificially intelligent, so it can better understand how students learn and what their interests are, in order to keep them more engaged in their education.

“This 200-year-old industrial age educational system that we all grew up in, in which we all sit in a classroom, the bell rings, and like cogs in a wheel, we change classrooms? Inevitably, half the students are lost, and half are bored,” Diamandis told WIRED on Monday at the Social Good Summit in New York City, where the new prize was announced. “The question is: How do you change that so it’s personalized education? That’s possible, and that’s the goal.”

‘We’re aiming at kids who live in villages where there’s nothing. This has to take them from complete illiteracy to basic reading, writing and numeracy.’

As Diamandis admits, there’s no shortage of technological innovation in education these days. The last few years have given birth to models like the massively open online course, which promises to give an elite global education to anyone online for free. But as important as this technology may be, he says, it often “assumes a higher state of learning than exists.” “If you don’t have the basics of education, you don’t know how to use the web and don’t know how to type in a URL,” he says. “We’re aiming at kids who live in villages where there’s nothing. This has to take them from complete illiteracy to basic reading, writing and numeracy.”

If X PRIZE were to achieve such an ambitious goal, it wouldn’t be the first time. In 2004, the foundation launched its Ansari X PRIZE, which challenged teams to create their own private spacecraft and is often credited with kickstarting what is now becoming a mature commercial spaceflight industry. Just last week, NASA awarded two multibillion dollar contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, entrusting them with the development of two new spacecraft that will shuttle NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station in the near future.

“I’m really proud we helped kick the private space flight industry in the butt,” Diamandis says of the Ansari prize’s legacy. “We helped bring regulatory reform, capital to the marketplace, and more excitement about spaceflight to the industry.”

Now, Diamandis hopes to replicate that success with the Global Learning prize. Teams will have six months to register, after which they’ll have 18 months to build their software. “It could be teams from Microsoft and Google or two kids in a garage from Nairobi,” he says.

Then, the foundation will test those technologies with children throughout Africa, and it is now raising money through crowdfunding to expand that test from 5,000 kids to 10,000. Once the winning team is chosen, Diamandis says he plans to work with companies like Google, Samsung, HTC, and other device manufacturers to ensure the software is integrated into all of their new phones and tablets.

“I want to make this software available for every tablet and smartphone out there,” Diamandis says. “Imagine that when someone gets a tablet in the future, it will become their teacher, as well.”