Hack the Beach 2017 Contest Sign-up
Jul 20, 2017
submission
#26
Submit your idea
Your idea/ technology/ company
| Name of your idea or project | Learnr |
| Which challenge area does your idea respond to? | Building Community, Learning, Economic Opportunity |
| Describe your idea and how it can help Santa Monica | Learnr is a mobile platform that connects skilled Santa Monica tech talent to afterschool programs. Learnr does this by matching needs with wants. An afterschool program often "needs" someone with the technical chops to demonstrate how to create a cool digital map or wrangle with open data to help teach and expose students to applied digital skills. A skilled volunteer "wants" to contribute his/her tech skills in a manner that is as easy as ordering on seamless and incorporate a sense of civic engagement into their daily schedule. Learnr enables this connection of skilled volunteer with afterschool program, at scale by helping scheduling a 1-hour session where a skilled volunteer can provide a high quality learning session to curious minds! |
| What stage is your idea or project in? | Prototype / MVP built |
| What needs to happen to launch your product? Please list all resources (hardware, software, licensing, legal/regulatory, funding, partnership or support from the City, data, etc.) required to launch your program. | Team ARGO has already developed a working prototype mobile application and developed a version of the matching algorithm. The app was built within the New York City afterschool system and will need to be customized to accommodating Santa Monica afterschool landscape. Further software development will need to take place to mature the application beyond what is available on www.learnr.nyc We will build towards deploy a limited Beta that includes upto 25 skilled volunteers (from various local tech organizations) and a few afterschool programs to test and refine volunteer <> school engagement around STEM content. In New York City, an early barrier that was cited during our protoyping phase is to ensure that volunteers are adequately vetted and that they need to offer biometric data to be allowed into the school premises. These are features that we plan to incorporate into Learnr to ensure a seamless experience between a volunteer expressing an intent to delivering some content on the school premises in a safe and responsible manner. We strongly believe that once we demonstrate this ability to match skilled volunteer with afterschool program to deliver some curated STEM content, we can engage in higher level partnerships with the Santa Monica business and tech community to open up a whole new volunteer pipeline who are other termed as Interested Bystanders (http://bit.ly/2vFvunZ) |
| How realistic is it for your idea to be implemented by early 2018? Please describe what resources (if any) you will need in order to ensure a working product by early next year. | Assuming a launch date of March 1 2018. October - December 2018 will involve a sprint to mature the mobile app and matching algorithm. December - February 2018 will involve a limited beta matching Santa Monica tech talent <> after school program Feb - March 2018 - we incorporate key lessons learnt into the app for a citywide launch to connect local tech talent with afterschool programs. |
You and your team
| Team Name | ARGO |
| List team members and their roles | --- |
| Contact email | --- |
| Phone number | --- |
| Primary Contact Name | --- |