Design and Implementation of a Persuasive Educational Platform for Underprivileged Pre-Schoolers

Abstract

Education is a powerful key for people to unlock the world and achieve a higher quality of life. It stimulates children's natural creativity and brings them a myriad of opportunities to achieve their dreams. However, in today's world, there are millions of children who do not have access to education from an early age. UNICEF (2017) states that there are 159 million children aged three to nine, who are denied education in the world. This is more than half of the overall world population in this age group. A lack of education sets these children on a trajectory to be marginalized and vulnerable from the outset and is implicated in a multitude of severe future consequences for wider society. There is an urgent need for society to pay attention to underprivileged children and help them have access to basic education. There are many factors that cause this problem – lack of investment from governments; lack of parental care; family poverty; lack of human resources; limited electronic devices, etc. All these factors cause pre-schoolers who are living in underprivileged conditions to have very limited access to education. Furthermore, most of the current research is focused on a single aspect of this multidimensional problem – underprovided children, education, or persuasive learning, etc. Very little existing research gives a comprehensive insight into the education of underprivileged children, and how we can address the problem by weaving persuasive learning techniques in combination with exponential systems and technologies. Our research focuses on precisely this gap - the nexus of underprivileged children, preschool education, and teaching and learning in the age of ubiquitous, exponential systems and technologies. We particularly identify gaps in the current practice of digital pre-school education systems and attempt to fill them by designing and implementing a prototypical persuasive crowdsourced teaching and learning platform. This research proposes concepts, models, process, frameworks, architectures, and workflows to support the design of a persuasive educational platform for underprivileged pre-schoolers. Furthermore, we implement a persuasive educational platform for underprivileged pre-schoolers that realises and instantiates the conceptual and system artefacts. The platform supports capturing, curating, discovering, and sharing of content that spans words, phrases, poetry, prose, audio, images, and video. The platform we have designed and implemented connects key stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and pre-schoolers. The platform enables reconfiguration and extension to meet the progressively changing teaching and learning needs of underprivileged pre-schoolers. As a proof of concept, we have configured the platform to support vocabulary learning for underprivileged pre-schoolers using a number of principles of persuasion, personalization, visualization, interaction and gamification; allowing children to learn any language from any other language.