Our Mission
The role of the student in the traditional K-12 learning process is passive: there is a mono directional information flow from teacher to students.
We aim to change this.
By employing modern interactive tools like tablet devices and large screens, we offer a new learning experience centered around the student's active involvement.
We conceived our platform as a modular solution that can be accessed by the students both in the classroom and at home. We embraced the Bring Your Own Device philosophy: a tablet is the personal enabler that follows the students and the teacher in every moment of the experience. The learning environment in context like the classroom switches from personal to immersive: the tablets connect together and dialogue seamlessly with large interactive surfaces like walls and tables.
The main pillars of our platform to reshape education via digital interactive tools
TOUCH INTERFACES, INTERACTIVE WALLS, TABLES AND TABLETS DEVICES
the new user interfaces have to be conceived from scratch considering the main interaction tool will be a tablet device with a capacitive touchscreen. The interaction language has to be bold, straight, quick, visual, reactive, showing a substantial breakthrough compared to traditional web-like interfaces. Focus has to be on content rather than on the interface itself. The user experience will stretch from personal tablet devices to large interactive screens while keeping its language consistent.
BLENDED CONTEXT AND ADAPTABILITY
The learning experience will mix moments where the student is at home alone and moments where he/she attends lessons in the classroom.
His tablet device will always be the core tool to access the experience. At home, it represents the gateway to asynchronous content fruition, in the classroom it becomes the tool to take part in synchronous learning moments and collaborative, highly interactive experiences with a social impact: the tool has to seamlessly follow the student from a learning situation to the other, becoming context aware.
While at home or out of the classroom the experience is mostly individual, the use of digital devices (i.e. large interactive surfaces) in the classroom provides the opportunity to both augment and enhance traditional teaching support creating a highly interactive and collaborative experience.
CONTENT CREATION AND DISTRIBUTION
In the existing learning platforms there is a clear separation between users and content managers, who usually are technical figures in charge of the digital content adaptation and their distribution. We have built a platform where every single user can actually translate their idea into digital interactive content ready to be used within the platform. We envision a user community of content creators.
The platform itself embeds the facilities to allow the content creation: a template and rules engine where users just fill the gaps and assemble the interactive lessons without coding skills.
The platform also supports continuous content updates from multiple sources: while the traditional platforms rely on a central hub for content update, we see a network of schools and institutions feeding continuously the content repository that grows in time. The content repository is not a central storage but a virtual distributed archive fed by contributors and seamlessly accessed by users. To achieve this purpose, a new technical architecture capable to support multiple contributors, guarantee the content synchronization and scale in time with the number of contributors has to be conceived.
The schools that have engaged with U are:
- Lycée Technique d’Esch sur Alzette (Luxembourg)
- Ecole Fondamentale Hollenfels (Luxembourg)
- Ecole Deich Dudelange (Luxembourg)
- Milan International School (Italy)
- Belmont House School (UK)
- Kinloss Primary School (UK)