Acknowledgements
Departments
We are grateful for the assistance of dozens of Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff from:
- Children’s School for user-testing initial prototypes of RoboTutor activities
- Computer Science
- Decision Science
- Design
- Electrical Engineering
- Entertainment Technology
- Heinz College
- Human Computer Interaction
- Information Systems
- Language Technologies
- Mechanical Engineering
- Psychology
- Robotics
- Simon Initiative
Institutions
as well as participants at:
- Academia Sinica
- Ashesi University, Ghana
- Awesome English, Jerusalem, Israel
- Beijing Normal University
- Beijing University
- Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
- Birla Institute of Technology & Science
- Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Indiana University
- JAMTECH
- Lakeland Community College
- MARi LLC for the original port of Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor to the Android
- Math-Fluency Data Collaborative for the original Akira race car game
- Mugeta School, Mugeta, Tanzania
- Nianjema Schools, Bagamoyo, Tanzania
- Playpower Labs for the original BubblePop game
- Swarthmore College
- University of British Columbia
- University of District of Columbia
- University of Massachusetts
- University of Pittsburgh
- additional home institutions of team members
Individuals
Special thanks go to:
- Dr. Leonora Kivuva for translating RoboTutor’s prompts into Swahili and for narrating them and its stories so wonderfully expressively
- Prof. Alan Black for training an amazingly natural Swahili TTS voice on Dr. Kivuva’s narrations
- Myriad former members of Project LISTEN for code and content from its Reading Tutor
- Prof. Sharon Carver, Dr. Ran Liu, and Dr. Julia (Xujin) Zhang for user testing at the Children’s School
- Joash Gambarage, Amy Ogan, and Judith Odili Uchidiuno for user testing in Mugeta
- Prof. David Klahr for donating code from his TED project to use in RoboTutor
- Fortunatus Massawe for user testing in Bagamoyo
- Fellow contestant Patrick Morris-Suzuki for help with many technical issues
- Kimberly Pena for user testing in New Mexico
- Kevin Willows, our former system architect, for helping RoboTutor reach the Finals
- Emily Wind for user testing in Jerusalem
- And last but very much not least, the dedicated staff of XPRIZE who were brave enough to undertake the Global Learning XPRIZE, talented enough to plan it, and dedicated enough to overcome the myriad daunting challenges along the way to its successful completion. Well done!