Tag Archives: Education

With #HonorYourMom, Samahope Wants To Fund Medical Treatments For Women In Need Around The World

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http://www.sundancechannel.com/blog/2013/02/isabella-rossellini-celebrates-motherhood-with-mammas

This Sunday, there’s a lot you can do for Mother’s Day. There’s TheMomtract (a project out of the ad agency Mother New York to give your mother authority over some part of your life). There are flowers and promises to let fewer of her calls go to voicemail.

But San Francisco-based startup Samahope hopes that funds usually reserved for cross-state chocolate delivery might be used to finance medical treatments for women in need around the world. Its #HonorYourMom project is soliciting donations for medical treatments for women along with tweet-length anecdotes about participants’ own parents’ uniqueness. And while funding fistula repair surgery may not have been part of some users’ plans this year, the nonprofit organization’s founders hope that providing safe birth kits in a mom’s name won’t take much convincing.

Samahope CEO Leila Janah is the founder of Samasource, a company that offers work opportunities on enterprise data projects to poor individuals around the world. Janah said that while she was on a State Department trip to Sierra Leone for women tech leaders recently, she quickly realized that Samasource was unlikely to work in a country with a 60 percent illiteracy rate. Yet she was disturbed upon realizing that a systematic failure to provide basic medical care to many Sierra Leonean women had resulted in Dr. Darius Maggi with the West Africa Fistula Foundation, a Texas-based doctor in his 60s, spending his retirement fundraising for and performing surgeries for women who had undergone traumatic child births.

“I thought doctors should focus on providing medical care,” Janah said, “and tech entrepreneurs could be focused on creating tools to raise money for them.”

Now being led day-to-day by co-founder Shivani Garg Patel, a McKinsey and Microsoft alum, Samahope hopes to be able to provide medical treatments for disenfranchised women. It is particularly focused on “last mile” populations in rural areas where care can be difficult, if not impossible, to find. Users can help pay for medical treatments in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Nepal and Mexico. Much like microfinance organization Kiva.org, partner organizations that work in those countries help connect funds with individuals in need, and users can connect their Facebook profiles and PayPal accounts. Samahope says it uses GiveWell and GlobalGiving to assess prospective partners and researches their budgets and effectiveness.

“I thought doctors should focus on providing medical care, and tech entrepreneurs could be focused on creating tools to raise money for them.”

Angel investors including Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, and Scott Banister, founder of Cisco-acquired IronPort Systems, have helped the organization raise $100,000. Patel says that 100 patients’ procedures have been funded by 250 users to date, with monthly donations growing an average of 60 percent this year. Since #HonorYourMom launched last week, they say that donations on the site have more than doubled.

The World Health Organization estimates that 2 billion people worldwide have no ability to access basic surgical care. Much of the focus of Samahope-funded operations is on fixable conditions that can be treated with surgeries. Users can help pay for cleft palate and burn surgeries resulting from close proximity to open flames used for cooking.

The team has an ambitious goal of making scary-sounding surgeries philanthropically funded, but they’re not alone. Watsi, the first nonprofit that Y Combinator welcomed to one of its famed accelerator program classes, operates in a similar space by funding operations for people in need. The Red Cross continues to be a popular resource for giving in cases of massive disaster-related medical needs (and one many individuals think of first). And the growth of crowdfunding and donation sites, while they have enabled choice, may create a sense of donor fatigue among people who are asked to give to different contacts’ causes daily.

When asked about the competition for dollars, Janah said that it provides validation that what they’re doing is valuable and viable. “Given the number of people who don’t have access to acute care, there is definitely room for multiple players in this space,” she said. “We should be competing to provide the best service. If you can provide access to health care, you can solve a lot of other problems. Our challenge is to show how powerful this investment in someone is.”

There is also an employment story underlying the cause: by helping women in need get well, they can get back to work. In the future, the site may try to provide opportunities to fund education on the path to jobs in medical fields. Training women and enabling increased career opportunities creates a “ripple effect of opportunity” among their families and communities, according to Half the Sky, a women’s rights organization inspired by the work of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Samahope says it will plan to expand geographically based on places where its medical partners can deliver the low-cost medical treatments with the highest impact. It has its eye on South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 2 million women are thought to live with untreated obstetric fistula. Selecting partners who can best serve patients may end up leading Samahope to work with larger development organizations, and the site also makes it possible to fund screenings for cancer and other detectable conditions.

Desire2Learn’s New Learning Suite Aims To Predict Success, Change How Students Navigate Their Academic Career

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Desire2Learn is a 10-plus year old Canadian company that makes learning software — a learning management system to be precise — and here’s why, in spite of that description, it shouldn’t bore you to sleep. In a space that’s traditionally been controlled by bigs like Blackboard and Moodle, Desire2Learn has quietly managed to carve out its own growing share of the market.

Last September, the Waterloo-based company raised a sizable $80 million round from NEA and others, and today has over 700 clients and more than 10 million people across higher education, K-12, healthcare and beyond are using its learning software.

Although the company doesn’t disclose financial information, we’ve heard that its institutional contracts are now translating into millions in revenue, which along with its raise, has allowed it to expand its staff from 600 to over 750 over the last year. In turn, the company has been ramping up its focus on acquiring EdTech talent and is rumored to be planning an IPO in the U.S. at some point down the road.

While Desire2Learn has established a solid base, it’s strategic M&A that can help lead the way forward, fighting off a flattening growth curve and leading to better products. The company has been acquiring with more frequency of late, including two back-to-back in January and March.

Desire2Learn acquired course recommendation engine, Degree Compass in March and is already putting its tech to use to continue expanding its learning platform. This week, the company announced what it called “the biggest update to its Learning Suite to date” — an update in which Degree Compass’ tech plays a central role, not only by expanding its toolset but by potentially changing the way students navigate their academic career.

To do this, Desire2Learn wants to bring predictive analytics into play in education. But why? Well, first and foremost because, today, if students want to figure out whether a course is right for them — or how well they might perform in that course — they’re hard pressed to find a good answer. They can ask fellow students, check websites that rank faculty based on nebulous criteria or try to find surveys, but none of these options are ideal.

With its new analytics engine, Desire2Learn aims to change that by giving students the ability to predict their success in a particular course based on what they’ve studied in the past and how they performed in those classes. The new, so-called “Student Success System,” was built (in part) from the technology it acquired from Degree Compass; however, while Degree Compass used predictive analytics to help students optimize their course selection, the new product aims to help both sides of the learning equation: Students and teachers.

On the teacher side, Desire2Learn’s new analytics engine allows them to view predictive data visualizations that compare student performance against their peers so that they can identify at-risk students, for example, and monitor a student’s progress over time.

The idea is to give teachers access to important insight on stuff like class dynamics and learning trends, which they can then combine with assessment data, to improve their instruction or adapt to the way individual students learn. In theory, this leads not only to higher engagement, but also better outcomes.

For students, they use Desire2Learn as they normally would, using it to view course materials, take quizzes, submit homework and chat with their peers. The platform then collects and analyzes each student’s personal data and, by drawing from a wider set of inputs, the engine can more accurately predict which classes students will perform best in and what their grades will be.

The system is currently operating at about 90 percent accuracy when it comes to predicting performance by letter grades, CEO John Baker tells us — a number which should improve as the engine accumulates more data, he says.

In addition to its predictive analytics, Desire2Learn is also making some significant updates to its mobile app, including new integrations with Dropbox and SkyDrive to allow students to engage with learning resources in the same way they do outside the classroom. What’s more, Desire2Learn is moving into Patbrite’s territory through ePortfolio and its new tool which allows students to build portfolios based on their in-school projects, grades and achievements in a way that’s applicable to life after school and finding a job.

Essentially, the tool allows students to move their academic resume to the cloud so they can take it with them after they graduate, which the company is incentivizing by offering 2GB of free storage.

Basically, what we’ve come to realize, the Desire2Learn CEO tells me, is that the company’s initial approach to business (or academic) intelligence was off track. “Students and teachers don’t necessarily want more data, they want more insight and they want that data broken out in a way that they can understand and helps them more quickly visualize the learning map,” he says.

When I asked if building and adding more and more tools and features would dilute the experience and result in feature overload, Baker said that the company doesn’t want to build a million different tools. Instead, it wants to become a platform that supports a million tools and allows third-parties that specialize in particular areas of education to help develop better products.

Through open-sourcing its APIs, Desire2Learn along with Edmodo and an increasing number of education startups are beginning to tap into the potential inherent to the creation of a real ecosystem. Adding predictive analytics tools gives Desire2Learn another carrot with which they hope to be able to draw both teachers, students and development partners into its ecosystem.

StoryKid, Created By Literature PhDs, Is An App That Helps Young Ones Tell Stories (And Their Parents, Too)

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storykid screenshot

Children are known for how much they love to play make believe, and StoryKid, an app introduced today during the Disrupt Hackathon in New York, takes this and gives it a new twist by offering a series of pictures as visual cues for a child to tell a story based around them. StoryKid is aimed at children aged 2 to 5 who are already talking but may either be too young or just starting to write. Created by two comparative literature PhDs from Columbia University, the idea is that this will, in turn, help bring children into the world of story telling and literature. And as co-founder Tianjiao Yu tells me, it can also be used by parents when they’ve run out of inspiration for their own made-up bedtime stories.

Yu, left, says that she learned to code to create the app, while her co-founder Lu Xiong, right, boned up on design and user experience to work on the visual elements. Their motivation to do this was to take what they’ve been learning out of the ivory towers of higher learning.

“Both of us are interested in the humanities and making them accessible to everyone,” Yu says. “We find creating an app is the perfect way to do this.” StoryKid is one of three ideas that the pair have to make literature more accessible to people. The other two, however, are more about discovery of existing literature rather than creating new things. The two are on the lookout now for a third coder who can help with creating these.

Indeed, even StoryKid, as it was created this weekend in the Hackathon, is still at an early stage of where they would like for it to be. The pictures, she notes, for today’s demo were sourced from visual search engine Niice but they will come from other sources when the actual app launches in about 1.5 months.

And the idea will be to also add in more of the to co-founders’ literary knowledge into the narrative structure. “You learn a lot of theories about how to analyse the elements of a story,” Yu notes. “We want to use them here to help generate stories instead, how to help people figure out relationships between people and places, or the connection between two characters.”

Then they would also like to add recording elements, in audio and video, but also in terms of preserving the pictures, to be presented almost like e-books of their own for retelling a story later. These could also link up with other programs like Evernote, which has developed a whole sideline in helping users keep track of what they have read and seen on the web, “a record for parents to know and remember what their kids have been thinking about.”

And although the app, such as it is now, is aimed at toddlers making up their own stories, you can see, too, how this could also be used for older children who are writing more, to write down their narratives once they have them together.

That sounds like schoolwork disguised as leisurely app time, but Yu emphasizes that the “main idea is to have fun, and to make literature fun.” I for one look forward to introducing things like this to my kids to see what they think.



Wonderville Launches An Interactive Content Library And Virtual Classroom Network For Kids

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Last July, a group of veteran executives from eToys, eBay, Sesame Street, Discovery and Disney unveiled their ambitious plan to create a souped-up Khan Academy for kids. But rather than a straightforward port, the learning platform, called Wonderville, aimed to expand on Khan’s approach to the “flipped classroom” by aggregating educational content from a variety of third-party sources.

Using eBooks, TV shows, videos and mobile apps from iTunes, Amazon, YouTube and beyond, Wonderville creates what it calls “Smart Galleries,” which consist of digital content like quizzes, apps, fact sets and so on designed to reflect what kids are studying in class. The content, which includes some fun topics as well (like Bigfoot) to keep kids interested, is vetted by Wonderville’s team of teachers to ensure quality and age-appropriateness.

After nine months of development, Wonderville is officially launching its new-and-improved pilot program. The new Wonderville focuses on Kindergarten through fifth grade (as opposed to its previous focus on a wider range), allowing parents and teachers to improve their lessons through the inclusion of Common Core-aligned content. Wonderville has also expanded its scope in the hopes of becoming a platform that enables teachers and classrooms to connect, collaborate and share media — along with providing access to smart galleries of learning content.

The startup has leveraged input from over 1,000 teachers to create hundreds of smart galleries, which now include more than 10,000 videos, images, quizzes and rewards — and support Common Core State Standards for K-5. Teachers can build from 2,700 lesson plans contributed by their peers, much like fellow EdTech startups, BetterLesson, LearnZillion and TeachersPayTeachers, each of which aims to find better ways for educators to discover, share and customize Common Core-aligned lesson plans.

Each of these startups is scrambling to beef up its library of lesson plans and sharing tools. LearnZillion, for example, has 120K teachers registered and reaches over 1.5 million students, while TeachersPayTeachers doled out over $20 million to more than 5,000 teachers for sharing their lesson plans for cheap.

However, in comparison to its competitors, which focus more generally on K-12 teachers and content, Wonderville has narrowed its focus to the younger crowd and may benefit from “specializing” in this way. Wonderville founder Mark Eastwood tells us that teachers in more than 50 schools across the country are participating in its pilot program, and 25 companies and institutions are contributing to its crowdsourced content model.

The startup is also eager to extend its value proposition beyond its interactive library of educational content, though, by allowing teachers to create virtual classrooms on top of its content, which work in concert with whiteboards, mobile devices and PCs. Today, 30 percent of U.S. classrooms use interactive whiteboards, a number that is expected to grow to 65 percent over the next few years, Eastwood says.

Thanks to its recently being accepted into the Smart Ecosystem Network for content developers, the startup is now able to reach more than one million teachers per month by populating their interactive whiteboards with Wonderville content.

The other draw for teachers is that they can use these virtual classrooms to create personalized learning “rooms” for each student, or use them to upload class pictures, video and messages. In turn, teachers could, say, choose one of Wonderville’s interactive quizzes or games, assign it to students to take home or put them up on their whiteboard during class to test students’ mastery of a specific subject. Parents and teachers can then track student development through the platform, while engaging them in ongoing discussions about everything from Bigfoot and space exploration to popular culture and Abraham Lincoln.

The founder also tells us that Wonderville is standing firm in the decision to offer its learning platform (and future products as well) to teachers for free. The base product, he says, is also free for families, while parents can participate in Wonderville’s subscription plan to tap into additional features and help guide their kids along their learning path. And that’s where Wonderville will begin to monetize — if parents want to get help their kids get ahead, they’ll have to pay.

Today, Wonderville has 10 employees and has been privately financed, but, as it looks to beef up its distribution partnerships (particularly by focusing on the iTunes), the startup will be looking to raise its Series A this summer.

For more, find Wonderville at home here.

Education Giant Pearson Continues Digital Push, Acquires Flipped Classroom Managers, Learning Catalytics

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Educational publishing giant, Pearson, has lately been making a push to snatch up (and incubate) promising young EdTech startups and concepts to help it compete in an increasingly tech-influenced educational landscape. Last May, Pearson acquired Certiport, the maker and marketer of IT and digital literacy products, for $140 million, followed by the acquisition of online learning services provider EmbaNetCompass for $650 million, its taking a stake in Nook Media and TutorVista, along with launching its very own EdTech incubator program.

Today, Pearson continued this march with the acquisition of Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based learning analytics and assessment system developed by Harvard University professors Eric Mazur and Gary King, along with software engineer and current post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, Brian Lukoff.

Founded in late 2011, Learning Catalytics is a platform that allows teachers to ask their students open-ended critical thinking questions and receive feedback in realtime. But beyond simply being a student response system and allowing teachers to get a better sense of what areas students are struggling with, the startup’s platform allows teachers to split their class into groups of similar ability.

The idea is that peer-to-peer engagement can help improve student understanding of core concepts, so the startup’s platform aims to make it easy for teachers to break class down into groups for based on their response patterns. This allows teachers to let students with a more advanced understanding of the topics at hand help get their peers up to speed, while allowing the teacher to supervise and curate those groups more effectively.

As students proceed through the class, they can respond to questions in class or for homework via text, numerical, algebraic or graphical responses. Meanwhile, faculty can get a better understanding of student performance through advanced analytics, which allow them to drill down into individual student data, as well as get a better understanding of student comprehension within the particular course and as compared to the class.

Fundamentally, by allowing faculty to ask questions and view feedback in realtime in a graphical representation of their students’ comprehension of the material, Pearson is adding an important new service layer for in-class feedback and communication. Pearson’s mission at this point is to become a service provider of customized tools and learning packages for teachers and for the changing profile of today’s student in higher education. That means an increased focus on flexible, blended learning services — at both ends of the classroom.

Pearson already has an LMS system, language learning, customizable online courses, and a host of other educational services, including the content-based services that its strong foothold in textbooks allow it to offer. Furthermore, the company knows that flipped classrooms and digital learning analytics aren’t going anywhere, and that’s why it’s made an effort to adjust: For example, today, over half of its revenue is now coming from digital products and services.

Traditionally, of course, Pearson hasn’t exactly been known as a pioneer in digital technology, so like its competitors McGraw Hill and Macmillan et al, it’s had to “go digital or go home,” so to speak. And with McGraw and Cengage both selling to private equity firms in the last month, well, it’s not exactly high-times for educational publishers.

As Pearson digitizes, like every other large company, it has to decide whether to try to build products internally or become an acquirer. In Pearson’s case, acquisitions make sense in a number of scenarios, but money is tight. I suspect that’s why the company issued its “efficacy framework” — to make sure its acquisitions and investments were meeting educational standards and, well, worth the investment.

This is relevant because, in Learning Catalytics, Pearson is essentially acquiring a student response system. And there are a number of more developed, well-established SRS players on the market, including the likes of the well-funded Top Hat, Turning Technologies and i>Clickr — to name a few. But these companies would have cost Pearson a pretty penny, and although neither company is revealing the terms of the deal, we hear it’s under $5 million.

Pearson has already partnered with Top Hat to offer as part of their bundled textbook, content and software services they provide to professors, which could ostensibly make for an awkward overlap. But we’ve heard from sources that Learning Catalytics was looking for an acquisition at this point as it hadn’t quite gotten the traction the founders hoped for, which allows Pearson to integrate a solid student response layer into their interactive learning and teaching products, without having to pay handsomely for it. And they get to keep Mazur, one of their top authors, happy in the process.

Learning Catalytics itself has been working with about 10 institutions, and offers free accounts to instructors, with student accounts running $12/semester and $20/year.

For more, find the Learning Catalytics founders’ letter to its users copied below:

We are thrilled to announce that Learning Catalytics has been acquired by Pearson. The new educational tools and novel data analytics in Learning Catalytics can now grow bigger, spread faster, and integrate better with other products and content, including Pearson’s widely used educational products. Learning Catalytics will continue to be available for current and new customers, and it will also have the ability to innovate further by leveraging Pearson’s considerable learning resources. Expect very big things to come.

We developed the technology behind Learning Catalytics in our research groups and classrooms at Harvard University but soon outgrew what fit there. To continue to innovate for our students and others around the world, we formed Learning Catalytics in July 2011. We could never have imagined how rapidly this technology would take off. More recently, it became clear to us that Learning Catalytics innovations have outgrown what can be accomplished in a startup, and so joining Pearson will help implement our ideas further and faster.

For help leading to this spectacular outcome, we are grateful to Pearson’s terrific team, Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, and especially our students — and other instructors and their students all over the world — who learned from Learning Catalytics and helped us learn from them.

Gary King, Brian Lukoff, Eric Mazur
Co-founders, Learning Catalytics

Pearson press release here.

Finally, A Competency-Based College Gets Approved

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College for America

Days are numbered for colleges that award degrees based on the amount of time students sit in a classroom. The U.S. Department Of Education approved financial aid for a new self-paced, online learning college, where students demonstrate competence, rather than earn credit hours in a semester-long class.

From the Chronicle Of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog:

“Unlike the typical experience in which students advance by completing semester-long, multicredit courses, students in College for America have no courses or traditional professors. These working-adult students make progress toward an associate degree by demonstrating mastery of 120 competencies. Competencies are phrased as “can do” statements, such as “can use logic, reasoning, and analysis to address a business problem” or “can analyze works of art in terms of their historical and cultural contexts.”

For instance, instead of signing up for an arts class, students are directed to online resources and are awarded the equivalent of arts credit by demonstrating mastery of the material through a presentation of a museum exhibit.

Southern New Hampshire college boasts that its Gates Foundation-funded College For America Program is “the first degree program to completely decouple from the credit hour.” Online Education pioneers, such as Sal Khan, have long advocated for a system that rewards students only for what they know, rather than for how long they pretend to learn inside of a classroom.

Humans don’t learn in pre-determined intervals, but as they progress from fact to fact and skill to skill. Khan, for instance, found that so-called “failing” students are often just stuck on a particular concept. Once they got over the hump, they raced to the head of the class, proving that not all students should learn the same material at the exact same time.

At Southern New Hampshire, “coaches” help students along the discovery process. It’s already attracted some big business partnerships, including Anthem Blue Cross and ConAgra Foods.

Keep these innovations coming, Department of Education. We’ll get education right soon enough.

App Discovery Service Appolicious Launches appoLearning – A New Way To Find The Best Educational Apps For Kids

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Appolicious, the app search and discovery portal which helps users find new mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, and Android, is today launching a new service today aimed at parents, teachers and others in search of the best educational apps for children: appoLearning. This new resource is Appolicious’ attempt solving the inherent problems with app search today, starting with a focus on apps for learning.

“We realized that whenever you get into a deep, vertical area like education, the metaphor of search doesn’t work,” explains Appolicious founder Alan Warms. “First of all, search is very contextual – I’m not just looking for ‘an educational app,’ I’m looking for a ‘seventh grade app.’ Also, I need context. I need transparency. I need to understand why was this app is rated the way it’s rated, who rated it, and why should I trust this person?”

On appoLearning, those questions are answered. The site groups educational app recommendations into eighty-four categories, like “reading,” “number sense,” “life science,” “social interaction,” speaking and listening,” and many others, which are also grouped into stages including “Early Childhood (ages 2 1/2 – 5),” “Elementary School,” “Middle School,” and “High School.”

Within a section, a selection of five apps are shown, each rated on a scale out of 100. These are meant to represent the five best applications within that particular category, as chosen by an educational expert whose bio appears on the site, detailing their experience. This section also includes an explanation about why these apps and the skills they teach are important, also written by the educator.

To be clear, these app recommendations aren’t just chosen editorially – on the backend, app reviewers (who are paid contributors), must rate apps using a Q&A rating system designed by Appolicious meant to normalize the ratings process. For each application, reviewers have to analyze  specific educational objectives on a scale of 1 to 3 – numbers which are totaled to give the app its final score. After rating all the apps within the category, the top five based on scores end up on display.

Many of the best apps here will likely end up being the paid apps, because they don’t bother the child with promotions, ads, or disruptive pushes to buy more content through in-app purchases. However, a comments section at the bottom of each app category page allows others to make suggestions as to how the list can be improved, or other applications people may like. These comments will be both vetted and monitored, helping to flag when the category may need a refresh.

A sixth spot for a paid, sponsored listing, clearly labeled as such, allows advertisers to promote their own apps to a very narrow target audience. This is available for $250 per week.

Warms says that the idea for this service occurred to him around six or so months ago, when his daughter was entering seventh grade. “I wanted to find an app for her that would help her practice fractions, decimals, and reciprocals. It was a horrific experience,” he says, explaining how difficult it was to determine which app or apps were of better quality.

But given the recent App Store turmoil surrounding AppGratis, and Apple’s ban of its app discovery service for apparently selling paid promotions, as well as Apple’s revised guidelines banning apps offering app discovery, it’s unclear how Apple would respond to a native app version of the appoLearning service, especially given its included sponsorships.

“We’ve talked to a lot of app developers in education, and they’re  frustrated because it’s really hard for their apps to be discovered right now unless they’re popular,” Warms says. “This service, if it’s as successful as we hope it’s going to be, is going to be great news for Apple also because it’s good for their ecosystem.”

Warms admits, though, that the company is unsure of the rules here – as most app discovery publishers seem to be these days. Instead, for now, appoLearning has been designed with a responsive website that adapts to both mobile and tablet-sized screens.

Now that the site is launched, the plan is to now rapidly grown from its current 84 categories to reach around 150, each with its own educational expert contributor. The plan is to also adapt this same process into other verticals like travel, business, finance, health, and more. A move into Android will also follow.

Interested parents and teachers can now browse the site here. AppoLearning competes with a number of new entrants narrowly focused on educational app discovery, including KinderTown, YogiPlay, as well as other app discovery and search services.

Where In The World Are The 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers? Mostly In The West – But Pi Founders Want More Spread This Year

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One to 1.2 million Raspberry Pi microcomputers have shipped since the device’s launch just over a year ago but where in the world are they located? While it’s impossible to say exactly where* each Pi has ended up, the vast majority of the devices sold to-date have shipped to developed nations — including the U.S. and the U.K. But the potential of the Pi as a low cost learning-focused computing platform for developing countries remains very exciting.

Last week the U.K.-based Pi Foundation blogged about a volunteer group that had taken a suitcase-worth of Pis to a school in rural Cameroon where they are being used to power a computer class. At $35 apiece, and even $25 for the Model A Pi, the Pi does a lot to break down the affordability barrier to computing — although it still requires additional peripherals (screen, keyboard, mouse) to turn it into a fully fledged computer terminal.

Asked about the global sales distribution of the Pi, the Foundation provided TechCrunch with some “very rough”, internal estimates of Pi sales to developing/emerging nations — and the figures (listed below) suggest that the first million+ Pi sales have overwhelmingly been powered by wealthier nations.

The most Pi-populous country on the developing/emerging nations list (India) can lay claim to roughly 0.5%-0.6% of total global Pi sales to-date, according to this data. While, collectively, these listed nations make up between only 1.4% and 1.7% of total global Pi shipments. So more than 98% of the Pi pie has been sold to the world’s wealthiest countries thus far.

India 6000
Indonesia 1200
Lao P.Dem.R. 600
Malaysia 3400
Philippines 500
Pakistan 100
Sri Lanka 50
Thailand 2000
Vietnam 500
Egypt 150
South Africa 2000
Tunisia 200
Zimbabwe 50
Bolivia 100
Chile 400
Colombia 20
Peru 50

There are also, of course, scores of (apparently) Pi-less developing nations that do not make this list at all. One of which – the Kingdom of Bhutan — does actually have a princely one Pi sale to its name at present, according to the Foundation. “It’s a server for Khan Academy Lite in a school, whose 64GB SD card costs more than twice what the Pi cost,” the Foundation’s Liz Upton tells TechCrunch. “We’re working on getting more out there!”

It’s likely that some of the Pis shipped to developed countries have found their way to less wealthy nations – via charities and other ‘suitcase schemes’ such as the Cameroon school project mentioned above which took out 30 Pis. Or via individual buyers seeking to avoid high import tariffs that can push up the price of bulk commercial imports (such as in Brazil).

But even factoring in some extra spread, there’s no doubt the Pi is predominantly disrupting the living rooms and schools of the developed world. Which, it should be noted, was the original ambition of the Pi founders — specifically they wanted to get more U.K. kids coding, following a national slump in interest in computer science education.

But the Pi’s unexpected popularity has generated additional momentum for the project — and even grander geographical ambitions.

“We’re weighted very strongly towards the developed world,” admits Pi founder Eben Upton, when he sends the data, but he says that this spread — or rather concentration — is something the Foundation is keen to work on. “A major challenge for us this year is to find ways of making Pi more available, and more appealing, in these [developing/emerging] markets,” he says.

The Pi hardware seems to offer huge potential to the developing world — being cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the other device touted as the likely first computing experience for connecting the “next billions” to the Internet. The Pi is also cheaper than another Linux-based low cost learning-focused computing project: the one laptop per child’s XO laptop. And it has an advantage over general Linux PCs or Android tablets in being conceived and supported as first and foremost a learning environment, making it well-suited to push into schools.

As for low cost PCs in general, the netbook category — still more expensive than Pi — is facing extinction by 2015, according to analyst IHS iSuppli, which has put out a forecast today predicting zero netbook shipments within two years, and just 3.97 million units globally this year.

As the traditional desktop PC declines, it’s great to see the rise of a new computing device that, unlike the slick consumer tablets du  jour, is intended to encourage hacking, tinkering and learning about hardware and software, rather than passive consumption of prepackaged apps — in the best tradition of the home computer. And a device which also, thanks to its tiny price-tag, has such huge disruptive potential.

So here’s hoping a lot more of the next million+ Pis end up very far from home indeed.

*At the time of writing, the Rastrack map, a project to get Pi-owners to report the location of their Pi and plot the owner locations on a map, was not accessible. The map is used in the feature image at the top of this post, showing a snapshot of self-reported Pi distribution in May last year