San Diego firm named a finalist in the $7 million Adult Literacy XPrize contest

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LU san diego photo A San Diego education technology company is one of five finalists for the $7 million Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPrize, which aims to improve reading skills via smartphone apps.

Learning Upgrade, a family-owned firm that produces reading and math lessons with music and animation reminiscent of the Schoolhouse Rock TV series, was named an XPrize finalist from an original pool of 109 teams from 15 countries.

The 10-employee firm will square off against the four other finalists in an ongoing 12,000-person field test being conducted in Los Angeles, Dallas and Philadelphia.

Then a panel of judges will analyze which mobile app achieved the best results among adult learners. The winner will be announced in early 2019.

The non-profit XPrize organizes contests to spark big leaps in innovation. Past contests included the Ansari XPrize to build a reusable private spacecraft. Qualcomm sponsored a $10 million Tricorder XPrize to build a hand-held medical device capable of diagnosing about a dozen diseases.

Before the Adult Literacy XPrize contest was announced three years ago, Learning Upgrade’s biggest customers were school districts and parents seeking to help their kids struggling with reading and math.

Over nearly two decades, the company has developed 960 web-based lessons, which users typically used on computers.

“We’ve had 1 million people go through on the desktop, but what happened in 2015 was the XPrize was specifically looking for an app on Android phones for low-income people to help them make a full-year’s gain in reading,” said Vinod Lobo, co-owner of Learning Upgrade.

Learning Upgrade built a mobile version of its program to enter the contest. Since releasing it for Android and Apple phones, the company has seen a sea change in demand, said Lobo.

More adults are taking lessons on their cellphones, including at the Umi Learning Center, which helps North African refugees, he said. In addition, more schools are opting for the mobile version.

The reason: The pervasiveness of cellphones.

“San Diego Unified has been sending computers home with families,” said Lobo. “But they don’t have Internet at home. The beauty of the phone is it has a data plan. So low income families, even if they don’t have a cable modem or Wi-Fi, the phone is the great equalizer.”

More than 36 million adults in the U.S. lack basic English literacy skills, said Chris Frangione, interim chief executive of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, which is sponsoring the competition along with Dollar General Foundation.

In many cases, it can be difficult for them to learn.

“These people might have multiple jobs, might have transportation issues, might have financial issues, might have kids,” said Frangione. “So what is the ultimate way to bring (literacy education) to them where they are -- when they are on the bus in-between jobs, after they put their kids to bed, on a break from work? They have their phones.”

Former First Lady Barbara Bush believed literacy was fundamental to success. Unemployment rates among low literacy adults are twice the national average. Forty-three percent live in poverty.

And there’s a generational carryover. Seventy-two percent of children of low literacy parents struggle with reading, said Frangione.

“She truly believed that the parent is the child’s first teacher and that has been proven over and over again,” he said. “That is why she wanted to focus on this. The adult literacy population is so under served. There aren’t that many tools out there. The funding is decreasing.”

The Adult Literacy XPrize has several layers. Each finalist received $100,000. Next year, the winning app developer will get $3 million.

In addition, two prizes of $1 million each will be awarded to finalist apps with the best results for improving literacy in two categories: Non-English speakers and native English speakers.

Finalist include AmritaCREATE from Amrita University in India; AutoCognita from a team based in Hong Kong; Cell-Ed from Oakland; and People ForWords, which is affiliated with Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

There is also a $1 million Communities Competition, where cities can win by getting the most adult learners to use apps from the finalist teams.

For Learning Upgrade, the XPrize competition has the potential to give the company a significant boost – not only by increasing awareness but also by encouraging employers and other groups to pay for the app for their workers and members, said Lobo. The first eight lessons are free. It then costs $7.99 for an additional 60 lessons.

“Any organization – a YMCA, a church – can get into the business of teaching people reading and math,” he said. “For 20 years we have been making these lessons. Now they are working on cell phones, and the response has been kind of amazing.”

San Diego firm named a finalist in the $7 million Adult Literacy XPrize contest

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