Eduapp4syria

The goal of EduApp4Syria is to make available an engaging mobile learning tool for Syrian children who are out of school, which can help them build literacy skills in Arabic and improve their psychosocial wellbeing.

Background

Almost 2.5 million Syrian children are out of school because of conflict. Many have to cope with traumas and high levels of stress, which also affects their learning ability. High availability of smartphones among war-affected Syrian families can be a means for reaching children with engaging and fun learning supplements.

This can help facilitate their continued learning and future reintegration into school. Between 2016 and 2017, Norway and several partners conducted an international innovation competition to develop an open source smartphone application that can help Syrian children learn how to read in Arabic and improve their psychosocial wellbeing.

History

The EduApp4Syria project was first launched September 25, 2015. We started the competition process with a dialogue with the market, to solicit input from potential suppliers and possible users for our development of the competition specifications.

The initial competition lasted from 29 January 2016, when it was announced by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs until the submission deadline 1 April 2016. The initial competition resulted in 78 bids from companies based in 31 countries.

In May 2016, Norad and the competition partners announced five winners of the initial EduApp4syria competition. Over the next couple of months, the five bidders were provided with funding and technical expertise to further develop and improve their prototypes.

Three finalists were chosen by an unanimous jury in September 2016. In addition to the jury’s assessment, expert advisors affiliated with the competition provided input to the selection of the finalists. In early August, 40 Syrian refugee children (aged 5-10) living in Norway tested the game prototypes, yielding important findings about the user friendliness and engagement potential of the games.

Winners

Two games won the competition, which are both free to donwload and free of adverstisements 🙌

• Antura and the Letters: Download from Google Play, the App Store or direct download.
• Feed the Monster: Download from Google Play and the App Store.

Source Code

This repository contains a snapshot (2017) of the source code for all the winners and finalists for archival purposes, and links out to the actively maintained repositories for the winners:

• Antura and the Letters: vgwb/Antura_arabic
• Feed the Monster: curiouslearning/Norad-Eduapp4syria

License

The apps and software developed as part of Eduapp4syria and included in this repo are all licensed under a BSD 2-Clause license:

Copyright (c) 2017, Norad-Eduapp4syria
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
  list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
  and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

All digital content included in this repository is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

Copyright:

• Antura and the Letters: Copyright (c) 2016 TH Köln / Cologne Game Lab, Video Games Without Borders & Wixel Studios
• Feed the Monster: Copyright (c) 2016 Originally developed by a consortium led by Apps Factory, subsequent translations by Curious Learning