Helping 100M students under ten learn how to read and write.

Augmented reality education for five y/o to master literacy.

Hey! I’m Zayn Patel, and I care about unlocking human potential, especially for kids in developing countries. I was a finalist in Schmidt Futures global learning tools competition. I’ve worked with the UN to build a digital literacy curriculum for women in rural Senegal. I also created a platform to help high school students select colleges based on social fit instead of our news and world reports ranking.

This memo concerns Beru, a scalable augmented reality education platform for 5–6 y/o illiterate students in India.

problem:

Currently, 200M children in India are illiterate. That’s the equivalent of filling up every building in new york city 25 times over.

This problem exists because:

• Covid took students who were literate pre-pandemic and turned them into illiterate students. These kids are at least three-quarters behind on instruction. Shreya Hegde, one of my teammates on this project, provided some perspective on education during the pandemic:

Covid showed us the big tech divide between kids in cities and villages. Half of the students could not read more than a few words, and three-fourths of their reading abilities declined during the lockdown. Many kids (some even older than 10) who previously knew to read and write their mother tongue forget it…