Persuasive educational platform design for underprivileged children

Abstract

Education is a powerful key for children to unlock the world and achieve a higher quality of life. However, in today’s world, there are millions of underprivileged children who do not have access to education. Research has long shown the benefits of technology-facilitated education – including higher achievement and improved attitudes towards learning. Despite these trends, technology-facilitated education remains restricted to the conventional education-system model and classroom setting; more of a tack-on than a truly disruptive force. We see great potential for quality, curriculum-approved education to soon be delivered via a software platform to even the most marginalized communities. Connecting key groups such as teachers, parents, and preschoolers, and bringing disruption in a similar way to how social media has revolutionized our cultural norms around interpersonal interaction. In this paper, we introduce the current trends and weaknesses of foundational areas in the literature: underprivileged preschool education, technology, and persuasive system design. Secondly, we outline the key gaps in the literature and explore the future research direction to create a persuasive educational platform for underprivileged children. Finally, we present and analyze a new integrated platform focused on enabling underprivileged children to have access to proper education. The platform we present is an integrated, persuasive, vocabulary learning system which connects configurers, parents, teachers, and preschoolers together. The functionalities of the system can be customized according to the current issues facing underprivileged children, although our system would suit normal children’s learning requirements at the same time.