About Founders

Aadya Srivastava and Anjani Srivastava are NASDubai high-school students and sisters that have created the "Kids for Reading" platform to promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of (1) quality education, (2) gender equaility, and (3) reduced inequality.

As girls in STEM, they have used their skills in computer science and coding to convert ebooks and teacher training materials licensed under Creative Commons (CC) License to mobile applications in accordance with UNICEF's Universal Design Learning (UDL) specifications.

Aadya has completed summer computer science programs at:
  • Carnegie-Mellon University and Cambridge University
  • Completed a summer engineering program at University of Pennsylvania
  • Created a passive internet backbone scanner
  • Aadya has also won Gold and Silver at UKMTS

    • Anjani has completed summer computer science programs at:
  • Oxford University and Brown University
  • Anjani has won a Bronze at UKMTS


    • TECHNICAL DETAILS

    Generation of UDL friendly e-book apps require manual intervention since we extracted the text and images from the materials, convert the text into a UDL friendly scheme, translate the text into 32 languages, convert the text to voice overs (in local accents), re-size the images for mobile (or tablet), and then re-package the resulting data into an Android and iOS app using MIT App Inventor. The conversion process is slow since the material is not ubiquitous and we could not define a streamlined work-flow. We are working to design a work flow as most of our content is downloaded from a World Bank sponsored site, Early Learning Resource Network. This site is ideally suited for us as the generated content is licenses for free use as goverened by CC license. We are highly appreciative and respectull of content creators as they are the true contributors for the cause of education by enabling free content. We have ensured that we create backlinks for their site, provide citation across all point of access, and have also created a new section on the site - App contributiors and citations that ensures citations, contributor names, and links to all contributors in addition to the in-app citations.


    CONTRIBUTORS

    We have classified contributors in three categories:
    Augmentors: We classify augmentors as contributors who would like to translate the text and assist with localized accent voice overs of existing e-books. As we are a non-profit endavour we cannot make payments however, we will list contributor's efforts on our site, provide citation, and ensure verification of your assistance to a third party. To contribute kindly review the list of available books here, this page also contains a CSV file with the text strings of that book. To contribute kindly add your translation to the CSV file, record the voice overs in a local accent, and share them with us over email at books@kidsforreading.com for incorporation within the application.

    Media and Press: We classify media and press as contributors who may wish to cover our efforts to enhance distribution of the e-books to people in need. Please contact us at press@kidsforreading.com with your queries.

    Institutions: We classify institutions as contributos who would allow us to use their learning material under CC license to impart education to student of Grade 6 and below. We are always looking for institutions that can not only share their material with us but also provide 'teacher aids' so that tutors, parents, and care givers can better educate their pupils.