Agavi: Offline Digital Learning for Ukraine

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