Inspiration
A few months back, I went to visit a charity organization called Tesfa Birhan with my friend. It was almost Christmas and she wanted to donate something for the kids. As we entered the compound, we run into a happy lot of children wearing rugged uniforms running around with a heartening smile on their faces. They were happy to be hear.
The main building, an old and rotting mud house, was composed of small rooms with specific purposes, one of which was a library. This library was filled with old, dusty worn out books donated from volunteers from a nearby university.
As the saying goes, "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". The best way to help these kids was staring me right in the face; Make them READ these books.
What it does
It's an app that tracks the readings of kids on the platform. Here's how it works. Anyone interested in doing charity work (Mostly High School and College students who like spending their time helping out in charities and volunteer works) will download this app.
They then go to any nearby charity center and add children into the platform. They assign books for them to read. They then track their readings by quizzing them on the books they've been reading. The quizzes come from the app itself. This makes it easy for anyone who has not even read the book to go and quiz a kid on the book.
The kids who read the books can participate in competitions organized by the platform. Every certain period of time, kids are rewarded for their accomplishments in that period. This encourages them to engage even more in reading activities.
If people are not willing enough to go to all the way to a charity site, that's alright. They can actually help out from home as well. They can add and review books on the platform. Or they can create quizzes for books they've already read. They can vote quizzes up and down, and they can help label questions as "Easy, Medium or Hard".
As people do this kind of voluntary services, they are rewarded with badges that go on their profile wall of the app. They earn points for each tasks they complete. And they also see the progress of the kids that they've helped out. They see how many kids they've been able to help so far. And they can also see how many kids were benefited from any kind of service that they've done in the past. Is there is anything more satisfying than putting good out into the world, and seeing it bear fruit?
And here's the best part of all. It's open source. Free to use. Free for anyone to take and make better.
How we built it
It is a two man team so far. One Android App Engineer and One API Engineer. Hopefully, this team will grow and the platform will be able to help children all over Africa.
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