Using Local Technologies for Smartphone Applications
With the initiative Students4Kids, the Assmann Foundation for Prevention promotes student inventions to fight hidden hunger in the world and supports their implementation on the ground. For this purpose, the smartphone can be an important mediator to spread knowledge and ideas in the affected regions.
While smartphones are widespread all over the world, their technical performance in less developed regions is far below the range of the possible due to local conditions like lagging infrastructure. Hence, there would be little point in creating a technically attractive app in Germany designed for developing countries, trusting that this technology will be a sure-fire success on its own.
Student inventions using smartphones or other means of (mobile) communication should consider regional characteristics and locally typical communication channels in order to be able to use the developed technologies on their full potential.
One possibility to approach this challenge is the platform dotlearn. Students from the D-Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston have developed model of how e‑learning courses should be technically adapted so that they even function with weak power spectrum, such as in very remote regions. Dotlearn recommends to replace educational videos through audio-image sequences to optimize memory usage while still remaining attractive to users.
Read and see more:
S. Bhattacharyya. Making digital education accessible to the 6 billion people without laptops or broadband. Availiable via http://www.dotlearn.org/paper.pdf on the platform http://www.dotlearn.org/