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Chicago Startup MentorMob Is Taking Girlscout Badges Online (photo Jose M. Osario/Chicago Tribune)
One things for sure, these aren’t your momma’s brownies.
The Girl Scouts of America are going high tech with the help of Chicago startup MentorMob and technology/financial partner Motorola Mobility Foundation.
Last month MentorMob was the recipient of a $150,000 prize as part of the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a contest sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation and others. MentorMob aggregates web based learning content into playlists. Mentor Mob CEO Kris Chinosorn describes what they do at MentorMob as crowd sourced learning.
MentorMob was originally set up to do learning content and that infrastructure is already in place. With the grant money from the Digital Media and Learning Competition they are building the framework for a certification and badge system. While the badge system is being designed for the Girl Scouts, Chinosorn is going to scale the technology to fit in any kind of setting. The certification system they are building will also be able to implement tests and quizzes to assess the level at which someone has learned the content.
More after the break
The Girl Scouts were a naturally fit to build out this part of the technology as Chinosorn tells ChicagoBusiness:
“It really stood out because Girl Scouts has a 100-year history with badges — real-life badges that they sew onto their sashes. They also have all this amazing content they’ve developed to teach girls.”
“What they are looking to do now is bring that badge system into the digital age. They’re asking, ‘How do you make digital Girl Scout badges and place them into a system that not only teaches the girls how to do things, but then can also assess their performance and then award them the badge if they perform well and finish all their drills and skills and challenges and journeys?”
Maria Wynne, CEO of Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Indiana said that the program that MentorMob is working on is the first step in digitizing the entire Girl Scouts badge earning system. Eventually the girls will be able to use a mobile app to track their progress towards earning badges and share their accomplishments with friends and family.
This isn’t the first step into the digital age for the 100 year old Girl Scouts of America, last year Girl Scouts started using online credit card processing for cookie orders. Alson, the Girl Scouts in Chicago are also working on earning a badge to build Android applications.
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Source: Chicagobusiness.com
