Experts fromGoogle have spent the last twelve months looking for organizations that serve as inspiration for their search for solutions to five international challenges: puttingeducational content on the internet for free, improveeducation, increase thegovernment transparency, innovate inpublic transportand offer a quality education to African students. After a long deliberation, and a phase of public participation with votingonline, the five winners ofProject 10100, selected from 154,000 ideas submitted from more than 170 countries.
1. Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization that offers free, high-quality education to all users anywhere in the world through an online library that includes more than 1,600 educational videos. Google is dedicating two million dollars to support the creation of more courses and so that Khan Academy can translate its main library into the most spoken languages of the world.
2. FIRST, a non-profit organization that promotes science and mathematics education around the world through a team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be leaders in science and technology by enabling them to work with professional scientists and engineers, thereby offering them real-world experience. Google will spend $ 3 million to develop and initiate new fundraising programs for student-led robotics teams that will enable more student teams to participate in FIRST.
3. Public.Resource.Org, which offers online access to public documents of the United States Government. Google will fund this organization so that the legal material of this country is available online and is in the public domain for all users.
4. Shweeb, a concept for urban and short to medium distance passenger transport using human-powered monorail vehicles. Google has put a million dollars on the table for research and development to test Shweeb’s technology in an urban setting.
5. Finally, two million dollars will go to finance the opening of additional centers of theIAfrican Institute of Mathematical Sciences(AIMS), a science and mathematics research and education center in Cape Town, South Africa.
A name with meaning
The organizers of Google explain that this initiative has been given the name of 10100because it is a way of expressing the“googol” number, a one followed by a hundred zeros. “The name of our organization reflects our goal of achieving great results throughsmart technology, which starts small, expands significantly over time and has a tremendous long-term impact, “they explain. Project 10100is a similar attempt to reproduce those scalable results “from the opinions and creativity of our users.” “We do not knowwhat ideas could help the greatest number of people. The premise of this project is that you may know it, “they conclude.
