OTAN News

Congratulations to the Adult Literacy XPRIZE Winners!

Recently, the winners of the Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE were announced. Congratulations go to the two winning teams that will share the $3 million grand prize: Learning Upgrade based in San Diego, and People ForWords based in Dallas, TX.

The competition began when the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy in 2015 reached out to XPRIZE to create a competition that would task teams with helping adult learners overcome the barriers they face to achieve basic literacy through the development of mobile apps on smartphones. The Dollar General Literacy Foundation also became involved in the project. Learning Upgrade focused on helping learners improve basic English and math skills through songs, video, games, and rewards, while People ForWords aimed to help learners improve their English reading skills. If you would like to learn more about the products, the People ForWords app is available on Android devices, while the Learning Upgrade app is available on both Android and iOS devices. Both apps are free to download.

The XPRIZE competition is shifting to a second phase of the contest called the Communities Competition, in which teams will be competing to see who can recruit the most users to download and use the Learning Upgrade and People ForWords apps, as well as the apps of two other finalist projects, AmritaCREATE and Cell-Ed. To learn more about this next phase of the contest, visit the Communities Competition webpage at: https://communities.xprize.org/prizes/communities

Again, congratulations to the winners and thanks to all of the teams for your work to help our adult learners move forward on the path towards improved basic literacy.

To read the Business Wire press release announcing the XPRIZE winners: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190208005329/en/