Agavi: Offline Digital Learning for Ukraine

Greetings all!

With summer over, we're happy to report that our summer interns did an outstanding job on pushing the Agavi platform forward on two fronts.  Giane (Brazil, student intern and now Science Voices volunteer) has been working with Alex (Romania, project lead) to get the platform off the ground.  Meanwhile, Leonardo (Brazil, student researcher) and Yuqing (China, student researcher) have been working with Jonathan (USA, analytics lead) in developing insightful analytical approaches to help teachers investigate how their students are performing in Agavi lessons.  We'll be working to integrate these two project components together in the next few months as we shift our focus to the lesson editor that will allow teachers to construct their lessons.

A quick reminder that the Little by Little fundraising campaign is currently running, and donations through GlobalGiving of up to $50 are matched at 50% all this week (ending September 22nd).

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

We don't have many updates this quarter as we've been having a lot of meetings around the world to catch up with (and often meet!) our partners in person to have long-term strategic discussions about our various projects, including Agavi.  This week we are in Romania prototyping and planning for Agavi with our Romanian volunteers as well as onboarding our Young Scientist Program students via our affiliation with Blue Marble Space Institute of Science who will be working with us on Agavi this summer.  We're aiming to get a functional prototype tested with our partner teachers in the next few months.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

I hope the new year has been treating you well.  We've been busy, as usual, on all our various projects around the world.  We have been working with our Ukrainian colleagues on implementing the Greenworks program, with students working on creating an environmental stewardship project.  The work has been challenging.  Most of our students are scattered across different cities or have had their homes bombed.  Many lack electricity or internet connectivity, preventing them from working together or accessing our digital content.  However, we have been persevering and working with these students to navigate them through these challenges.

Given the challenges that our students in Ukraine face, along with the evolving nature of our young organization, we found it prudent to reorganize our projects.  Science Voices works on two main projects, Greenworks and Agavi.  Greenworks is an environmental stewardship global classroom, while Agavi is a digital learning system for challenging environments.  We work on implementing both projects in the countries where we work (Ukraine, Brazil, and Indonesia, with supporting work coming from the US and now South Korea).  This project in particular has been a part of both endeavors as we have had a lot of difficulty getting to Ukraine for in-person work first because of the pandemic and then because of the war and so we have tried alternative ways to help where we can.

Moving forward, this fund will become focused on developing and deploying the Agavi system across Ukraine.  We expect to have the system functional and in testing with teachers by later this year.  This project (the digital architecture) will be paired with our Agavi efforts in Brazil, which focus on developing complete digital lab science kits (the physical architecture) for deployment.

If you are interesting in supporting Greenworks, look for our Greenworks projects (environmental projects and engineering projects).  We'll be having a 200% matching fund drive March 6-19 to build a Greenworks fund that we can use over the next year to support student environmental and related engineering projects for the next year, including for our students in Ukraine.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

I hope this message finds you well.  As you know, the war in Ukraine is still raging.  However, with the west remaining calm (which is where our colleagues live and work), we are proceeding with launching a new virtual program with our faculty contacts there.  Greenworks is an environmental education and impact program we have been successfully running in Indonesia for the past couple of years.  In this program, students learn how to design, implement, and evaluate their own small-scale projects that address an environmental issue they have identified in their community.  We are completing the pilot run of a "project/mission development" curriculum in Brazil at the moment and will be integrating an updated version of this curriculum with the community projects in a pilot run in Ukraine in a few weeks.  Our goal is to develop an exchange network between students and teachers in Ukraine, Indonesia, Brazil, and the US to create grassroots change on urgent environmental issues.  This is the first step.

In addition to providing students with an active learning curriculum and funding to implement their projects, we will also be training teachers in classroom approaches to help manage and support this active learning curriculum.  Part of classroom modernization is improving how teachers teach.  So while our ability to operate in Ukraine is limited, we can still help improve teaching approaches while we await our in-person return.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

I hope you are well.  Our colleagues in Ukraine are currently safe, but many of them have fled Ukraine and are scattered throughout Europe.  This has made it difficult to work on projects like Greenworks at the moment.  We are in frequent communication with our colleagues to understand how we can better support them in this dire hour.  In the meantime, we are working to repurpose other endeavors we are working on, such as the Amazon River school project and Agavi, to help address the education needs of Ukrainian teachers and students.

Please keep Ukraine and its struggle against oppression and barbarism in your thoughts and maintain pressure on your local and national governments to keep the light of freedom from getting snuffed out.

With gratitude,

Lev