For years, everyone has talked about the digitalisation problem of schools. I believe we have a different one.
Politicians announce programmes, billions for tablets and Wi-Fi. And then we hear it again: schools are lagging behind. Yet there is no lack of devices. What is missing is an ecosystem that brings good ideas to where they are needed.
These ideas have existed for a long time. Parents and teachers build learning apps for their child or their class, with passion. But the apps stay where they were made. Whoever wants to use them carries the risk alone. And whoever built them never learns whether they helped.
I am a software developer. For some time now I have seen how easy it has become to build small apps. With an AI assistant it hardly takes any time or money. Yet very little of this reaches schools.
I don't want to keep complaining. I want to do something. And I want everyone who cares about good education to be able to do something too. Especially now, when you feel powerless in so many places, this matters: to see that your own work reaches a child you have never met.
That is why I am founding lernapps.net. I don't want to earn money with it. First I want to see whether the need is real. If lernapps.net carries, it could become an association, for example. Then the platform belongs to those who fill it with life.
“This won't work anyway.”
Maybe. We don't know yet. That is why we start small: with a few apps and a few people who build and use them. We wrote down beforehand how we will notice whether it works. And how we will notice that it doesn't.
We planned lernapps.net with the Platform Design Toolkit, a method for designing platforms. It states who takes part, what everyone gets out of it and what we try first. Everything is public.
The documents are in English.
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Find an app for tomorrow. Or build the one that is still missing.