All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development- Enabling Writers prize competition ($100,000)

Submission Deadline: October 1st 2014

All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) has launched “Enabling Writers,” a $100,000 global prize competition to incentivize the development of software solutions that allow writers to easily create and export decodable and leveled fiction and non-fiction readers in mother tongue languages to help early primary students (ie. grades one to three) learn to read.

The Enabling Writers prize competition seeks to drive the creation of new software technologies—and the improvement of existing programs—that make it easier, more cost-effective and efficient to write high-quality early grade reading materials that follow tested reading instruction methodologies.

The prize competition is powered by InnoCentive, a global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems.

The Software

‘Enabling Writers’ aims to spur the development of software that would allow writers to use an easy step-by-step process, on a computer or mobile device, to create texts that follow tested early-grade reading instruction methodologies. The software would:

• Work for writers who know a story they want to write or a subject matter they want to present, but also provide less prepared writers with existing stories and nonfiction text that they could adapt for their audiences;
• Support the creation of both decodable and levelled readers
• Ensure writers are kept within technical boundaries appropriate for the target reader and reading level; and
• Provide directions and prompts in a common national language, but allow authors to write in both national and local languages.

The winning software will be freely available and released to the public for open source development

Prizes

Not only will you be contributing to improving literacy in the developing world, the three finalists will receive:

• A $12,000 cash prize
• Invitations to exclusive events
• Global recognition from ACR GCD
• Expert feedback on their software from child development and digital education specialists
• The chance to win $100,000
  

Submit your entry for the  Enabling Writers prize competition