Our Born Ready campaign for the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education (ADECE) aims to empower parents and caregivers to boost their children’s early brain development by providing them with free resources they can use every day. We partnered with Vroom.org to give parents and caregivers access to thousands of science-based learning tips and activities on our website, bornready.org. But we didn’t want to stop there.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. and many families were sheltering in place, we knew there would be more at-home parent-child interactions than ever, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible for parents to access our helpful tips and content. Our smart-thinking team found the perfect solution in our smart home devices.
“With parents’ hands always full, we saw a great opportunity to help them through our Alexa and Google Home skills. By saying ‘Alexa, give me a Born Ready tip,’ or ‘Hey Google, give me a tip from Born Ready,’ parents can quickly receive a tip on how to engage their children in brain-building activities without taking their attention away from their little ones,” said Telegraph’s Chief Technology Officer, Kenny Kung.
By making access to resources as simple as just asking, we helped make a stressful situation for parents—a sudden shift to exclusively at-home learning amid a pandemic—a bit less intimidating, which is all part of the Born Ready mission. This project was our way of empowering parents with a pragmatic solution. Kung said, “We were excited for a chance to leverage voice assistant and artificial intelligence technology to provide a simple and practical application for busy parents. Using a serverless back-end, we created a lightweight but highly extensible framework that offers an intuitive hands-free experience with virtually limitless capacity for additional features and functionality.” How’s that for a smart approach to learning?