One Globe Kids: Avoiding Prejudice One Friend at a Time
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Impact: What is the impact of the work to date? Also describe the projected future impact for the coming years.
Spread Strategies: Moving forward, what are the main strategies for scaling impact?
Financial Sustainability Plan: What is this solution’s plan to ensure financial sustainability?
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Founding Story
Team
Anne
Glick
One Globe Kids
, Voorburg
, Worldwide: English, French and Dutch-speaking/learning regions
Friends and family, Individuals.
- UK Educational App Store - "A fantastic app for letting children appreciate the similarities and differences they share with others around the world", 5 stars
- Common Sense Media - "Stories, beautiful photos help kids build global awareness" - 5 stars quality, 4 stars learning, Top Pick Summer Learning Guide
- Common Sense Graphite- "Amazing cultural and social learning experience", 4-start learning rating
- Smart Apps for Kids- "New top pick for multiculturalism" - 5 stars
- AppoLearning - "Will keep them curious about other cultures" - Score 86
- CoolMomTech "One of those apps our kids bring up later, remembering what they've learned" - Ten Best Kids Apps 2013
- Teachers with Apps- "Teachers love this app!"
- Kids App Central - "One of the best apps we've ever reviewed"
3 - 5, 6 - 12.
Parent.
I am applying on behalf of a particular program or initiative.
Public (tuition-free), Private (tuition-based).
Curricular.
Actively Designing Space & Culture as Essential Elements for Learning: Creating cost-effective methods to infuse a school with habits, language, and materials needed for learning through play.
Parents and educators who want to use One Globe Kids and provide feedback
Advice about common international themes for children and use of our international nettwork
Increased empathy, especially for those in a different "group"
Reduced or avoided prejudice among young children
Improved social and emotional intelligence
Improved ability to understand another's perspective (perspective-taking)
Advanced critical thinking skills
Global competency
Confidence and willingness to initiate intergroup contact and friendship
Interest in learning a foreign language
Confidence communicating across cultures
Increased creativity from being exposed to new ways people do things
We create intimate, safe virtual experiences that enable kids 3+ to imagine befriending someone outside their own “group” – 100+ photos per story; narration in 3 languages; adventure choice; tell about yourself; record yourself in friend’s language. Globe Smart Education offers discussion themes and experience, art, math, writing, and taste activities, leading students toward global SEL. It is available to children with internet or iOS access worldwide (over 11K downloads from 91 countries as of Sept. 2014). Once they’ve met, there’s no limit to their imaginary play together.
Making the foreign feel familiar responds to important trends:
• Education: Global competency and SEL are crucial skills for taking on 21st century problems.
• Storytelling: The desire to learn from and know about each other while sharing about ourselves.
• Virtual technology: Sharing, learning and connection in constantly evolving ways.
• Intergroup conflict: Around the globe people look for solutions to fear, prejudice and the inequality it causes.
One Globe Kids has re-imagined learning to offer children a fresh start in preparing for the future we want them to have.
Children have vivid imaginations. While they’re not really in the ballet or catching bad guys, imaginative play prepares them for real and active participation in the world. They’re playing the future.
Learning through play unlocks their ability to imagine things not as they are but as they could be.
As William Arthur Ward said, “If you can imagine it, you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”
By playing an inclusive future children are building one. A child with an imaginary friend from another country today will more likely have a friend from there tomorrow.
Our product development phase was 100% self-funded; our CMS enables max. flexibility at min. cost. In Yr 1 sales covered 22.5% of annual operating costs. In Yr 2 we introduced an accompanying education curriculum. If sales remain steady, in 2015 we will cover 75% of operating costs from profits.
Our mission is to help make the foreign feel familiar by creating experiences for children that encourage cross-group friendship. While we have chosen a for-profit business model to avoid the uncertainty of grants and donations, both partners work as volunteers until the business is financially sustainable. By creating products people are willing to pay for, our customers become partners in our mission.
To expand our product offering (more countries, more friends!) and market reach among customers who already have internet/iOS access, creating a solid profit base for our company. This financial stability will enable us to expand our reach to communities and countries with less internet/iOS access.
• Our collaboration with Apple enables us to distribute our products instantly and simultaneously around the world.
• By partnering with children and their families around the globe, we are able to share the experience of cross-group friendship, reducing anxiety and improving expectations for these relationships in the future.
• Partnering with schools and teachers multiplies our impact, reaching more students with global play2learn tools.
We have made inspiring and potentially fruitful connections, including possibly introducing our project within the Kids for Kids preschool program, connections to create additional stories such as with Door Step Schools in India and Extreme Kids&Crew in the USA, and collaborating with playGlobo.
Our products will be the first stop, online and offline, for play and education that makes the foreign feel familiar, promoting global imagination and enabling children to experience and prepare for life beyond their routine.
One Globe Kids will have inspired children around the world to make cross-group friendships in their youth, and society will continue to benefit from the prejudice-free decisions they make as adult citizens and leaders.
More research is needed to understand the processes that create and encourage positive intergroup contact. Through our contacts with research groups and schools, we focus on understanding and influencing:
• Perceptions of commonality
• Anxiety toward persons from a different group
• Expectations for intergroup contact
• Empathy toward someone from a different group
• Global imaginative play
• Amount of cross-group contacts and friends (key
1,001 to 10,000
Other (please specify)
Many outside educational groups have published reviews about One Globe Kids, the product.
Fewer than 10
10-100
Pretence/ Socio-Dramatic Play.
Comments
This is a project with a very broad and forward thinking remit.
Identifying ways and means of children mixing with a wider variety of backgrounds is the essence of moving forward across all society. There is a great deal of responsibility adopted in your project, which is great to see and sincerely hard work. For me this project has managed to identify the fundaments of what helps children by doing the hard things to make a raft of experiences accessible and easy for children to feel associated with. It is particularly nice to read that you happened upon this when realizations struck you when reading to your won children. It is incredible the amount of times children remind us of things we'd forgotten about.
Finally, as integrating children is a key component of your work and we are all one biological culture, is it possible to create a character or tell a story that can portray this? As schools are now introducing evolution into UK curricula, for the first time. Just a thought.
Good luck with OGK and keep in touch!
This is an excellent project-a much needed one and I wish you the best in making this a grand success!
Thanks for your thoughtful response. We completely agree that children remain a great source of learning! Your idea about a character or story to portray evolution is interesting. Others have suggested using our interactive, story-telling style to teach about other periods in history. Once we start brainstorming, it can be hard to stop!
We have been following UK curricula and are especially enamored with their introduction to geography curricula: "A high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. " We totally agree!
Yes, let's definitely stay in touch - your blocks are brilliant, as we wrote earlier. Best of luck!
Congratulations for the project! One question, have you thought of incorporating somehow "real" interaction between the kids, maybe through videoconferences?
Miguel, Good question. Increasing real interaction is absolutely part of our mission! Due to privacy concerns and linguistic limitations (the children featured only speak their native language, other volunteer child narrators have recorded their story in English, French and Dutch) we are not planning to facilitate actual virtual interaction within our current project. It targets children up to 10 years. For future projects designed for kids 13+yrs, that type of interaction, via video conferences or other, could be possible. Right now, we hope it gives kids confidence and openness to interact with and befriend people from different groups in their immediate environment, expanding to international friendships in the future.