Exoskeletons and innovation bricks - how we can solve big challenges

Exoskeletons and innovation bricks - how we can solve big challenges

The story of how my 5-year-old daughter and I built a robotic exoskeleton for her paralyzed arm. After learning there were no treatments we could afford, and only a 2% chance of recovery, we decided to leverage Open Social Innovation to build our own solution. A year later, leveraging the collective intelligence of experts around the world we built an exoskeleton, 100X cheaper, 10X lighter, and one that enabled her motor neurons to repair themselves! Today she can move, unassisted and has recovered 60% of her strength! This is our story:

One Learning Planet

One Learning Planet

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We are off to Paris to prepare for the launch of the Learning Planet assembly together with UNESCO and the CRI.

There are more than 200 million students in higher education. Most students feel disengaged from the learning process but are highly concerned about world’s biggest problems and want to act.

This is the time to involve everyone in developing sustainable solutions. This is the time for building a learning planet.

Want to learn more: https://www.learning-planet.org/

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How to build a "Google Maps" for learning, a GPS to guide you to any learning goal.

How to build a "Google Maps" for learning, a GPS to guide you to any learning goal.

HOW To build a Google maps for learning:

There are a number of ways we can create a “Google maps” for learning, and a GPS that runs on it to guide you to any learning goal. Here I’ll describe three methods I have tried over the years, their pros and cons, and why the best results will come by combining all three methods.

 

The Background:

Where these insights come from

  • +8 years of work on this problem

  • +6 Prototypes and working apps

  • +2,000 1-on-1 in-depth youth interviews conducted in many settings, refuge camps in Africa, homes in the middle east, k12 classrooms in the US, maker spaces in India, Colledges in Japan…

  • +10,000 Hours of user research, experiences, successes, and failures

Key Insights from past prototypes/research

Static Maps

  • Young kids loved this!

  • High cost to design

  • Can only work for maps that work off known learning destinations and linear learning paths

 

Hybrid Maps (Static)

(Static map background, dynamic path layer)

  • The map’s background does not convey any useful information, and therefore quickly becomes boring. 

  • Kids were initially excited about the map but then became really disappointed!

 

Hybrid Maps (Styled)

(Styled Map background, dynamic path layer)

  • Simple to implement and create different “themes”

  • There is no map feel to this, little reward for learners to explore new regions on the map


 

Abstract maps

  • Simple to implement

  • Quickly becomes boring 

  • No reason to explore and discover new things



 

Treemaps

  • Good metaphor and a great way to represent past learning, but not future learning. 

  • How we learn is not in tree-like branches, but rather a highly connected web, that quickly breaks this metaphor.

  • Treemaps cannot be used to explore anything but traditional linear learning paths

  • Learn more about this prototype here.

 

Lens-based maps

  • Easily implemented 

  • Easily skinned to suit any learner, can use procedural generation to design maps for kids to adults

  • Can scale in real-time to accommodate new competencies and paths as we generate them.

  • Learn more about this here.

 

Three METHODS:

METHOD 1 - BUILDING FROM STANDARDS

An approach we can use to build the learning map is to build it from extracting nodes from standards, like the US common core standards, European educational standards, or national curricula. Here we have pretty well-defined standards we can convert into nodes. This method was tested when we were running the Moonshot Education Project, explained in this blog post: one-size-does-not-fit-all-overcoming-our-factory-education

Pros

  • Easy to generate maps for traditional education and domains

  • Easy for existing providers to leverage map

Cons

  • Not scalable

  • Does not work for non-traditional domains

  • Does not allow for cross-domain path generation


Method 2 - BUILDING FROM EXISTING MATERIAL

One approach we can use to build this Learning Map is to build it from deconstructing existing courses, curricula, online programs, textbooks, lectures or any other pre-packaged learning paths. In this method, we leverage the expertise of educationalists who have created courses, online learning programs, youtube videos or lectures to define not only the nodes, but also the links between them. We then use this as a “seed” to create the start of the map. Here, in this illustrated example I’ll describe this approach. 

Pros

  • Rapidly generate maps for any domain that has existing content

  • The map becomes a new channel for existing content and content producers

Cons

  • Building an automated pipeline to deconstruct content is complex.

Method 3 - BUILDING FROM ONTOLOGIES

A third approach to building the learning map is to build it from an ontology like Wikipedia. Like building from standards, this is relatively easy as it again has well-defined structured data, however, in this approach, there are no learning paths within the ontology. Projects like the we.learn project by the CRI are leveraging this method and using learner-generated paths to augment a map built on a Wikipedia ontology.

Pros

  • Rapidly generate a Map of all human knowledge

  • This map is continually updated, and we could both leverage the Wikipedia community AND contribute to it too!

Cons

  • Links do not have directional information, there is no Path information.

 

Why we need to do all three

  1. We need to do all three approaches in parallel so that we cover all available knowledge and educational material.

2. We need to do all three methods to get the greatest data coverage, metadata, relationship data, ML Data.

3. Why we need all three methods as its the only way we can get all required features

 

If you want to work on this with me reach out!

 

3 Projects, 2 days, 1 goal: Turn disability into ability!

3 Projects, 2 days, 1 goal: Turn disability into ability!

HACKAHEALTH Geneva

14th-15th April 2018

 

Join us at the Geneva HACKAHEALTH event where various differently-abled people will come together to develop assistive devices, then publish the work as open source so that others can do the same. 

We will continue on the journey of Chiara, Lorelei, Eric and Yariv as they hack their own health

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If you are a Maker, Designer, Developer or Engineer interested in learning new skills, developing some cutting-edge solutions or just having fun with like-minded hackers, join us. 

 

 
 

A quick catchup

As we progress with ramping up the Open Social Innovation project we travel around the world gathering support and collaborators. From the west coast of the US where we visited friends at Google and X to the far-east where we meet with the most innovative organizations doing good.

2018 is here, and we are excited to progress!

 

 

 

 

Inspiring Changemakers

Inspiring Changemakers

We can empower our kids to lead the way in solving some of the world's grandest challenges! We are partnering up with Ashoka on an amazing project to do just that. 

What I've been up to (Bodo Hoenen)

What I've been up to (Bodo Hoenen)

When life happens

 

My work on Dev4X was put at a lower priority for a few months, , here is why:

My daughter, Lorelei, was diagnosed with Acute Flaccid Myelitis a rare polio-like syndrome and lost the use of her arm. Traditional treatments would have given her about a 5% chance at recovery, and state of the art treatments were too costly. Without any experience, we decided to tackle this challenge by setting up an open project and reaching out to experts for help. 

We have now built a robotic assistive arm that is helping her move and which has increased her chances of rehabilitation. Over the last several weeks she has now slowly started to regain the use of her arm and is able to move!

Here is a video about our story:

 

Want to build your own robotic assistive arm?

 

Here are the instructions: www.ourkidscandoanything.com

 

The New York Times hosts us on a panel about empowering girls

Providing Support

We were honored to join a panel on empowering girls and 'Female Capital' hosted by The New York Times and sponsored by J. WALTER THOMPSON WORLDWIDE

Announcing the finalists in the #Mirum24 project to support Dev4X

Announcing the finalists in the #Mirum24 project to support Dev4X

As you may have read in our previous post, Mirum wanted to do something impactful. So they asked their clients to vote for their favorite early-stage charity, promising to put their Mirum24 maker teams into action to help the chosen charity reach their goals. They chose our project and this is a post about selecting the finalists in this #Mirum24 project.

Dev4X awarded a place at the Unreasonable institute lab in NYC

Providing Skills, Advice and Support

The Unreasonable institute in NYC has awarded us place in their program where they support us with advice, insight, networking support and access to funding. 

#Mirum24 project to help build global learning map

#Mirum24 project to help build global learning map

Mirum Agency, a digital agency under JWT, selected our non-profit as the focus of their #Mirum24 project an idea-thon in which 15 global Mirum teams are competing to help us further our efforts to provide education to the most underserved children.

Mirum support us through their #Mirum24 project

Providing Skills

This past holiday season, Mirum ran a Holiday Campaign and invited their clients to vote for an inspiring nonprofit.  The purpose: to put their Mirum24 hacker teams to work solving a difficult global challenge. 15 teams came together and generated some amazing ideas. Read more here.

Shuttleworth Foundation application

Shuttleworth Foundation application

This is the application I put into the Shuttleworth foundation to join their fellowship program. It's part three of 'the world as I see it' blog series.

First steps to literacy

First steps to literacy

Inspired by Minecraft and Loombands as self organised learning environments (SOLE), a gamification strategy was developed by Natalie Denmeade to encourage pre-literacy skills in young children. A first step in this framework is to use comic strips (aka graphic novels) to associate letters as codes for sounds.