Designing a Voice-based Literacy Support Tool for Parent-Child Learning in Côte d'Ivoire



Côte d'Ivoire, like many developing countries, faces low adult literacy rates and challenging schooling conditions. To help supplement in-school literacy learning, we are designing a voice- and SMS-based literacy intervention delivered via low-cost mobile phones, which can scaffold parental support for their children's literacy learning. We have used a user-centered design process to understand the needs and challenges of Ivorian children, parents, and teachers, to distill a set of design guidelines appropriate for the Ivorian context.

This year, we have conducted a 2 month pilot study with 40 families in one village in rural Côte d'Ivoire, and are planning for a 4-month longitudinal study with over 600 students across 16 villages in spring 2019.

You can read a brief blog post about this project on the Human-Centered Computing Across Borders blog.

We published a short paper at the HCI Across Borders Symposium at CHI 2018, about our proposed design process for developing a voice- and SMS-based platform to scaffold parents' support for children's literacy learning in Côte d'Ivoire, and we have a paper to appear in CHI 2019 on the first needs-finding qualitative design study with parents and children.

We also published a paper in the ACM COMPASS conference on some of our team members' related work in a Tanzanian context, on design implications for peer-peer and adult-child learning processes, both at school and at home.


Madaio, M., Tanoh, F., Blahoua Seri, A., Jasinska, K. & Ogan, A. (2019, to appear). "Everyone Brings Their Grain of Salt": Designing for Low-Literate Parental Engagement with a Mobile Literacy Technology in Côte d'Ivoire. Accepted to the 2019 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.


Madaio, M. & Ogan, A. (2018, April). Supporting Parent-Child Literacy Interactions with Feature Phones in Cote d’Ivoire. Presented at the HCI Across Borders Symposium at the 2018 CHI Conference. [pdf]


Uchidiuno, J., Yarzebinski, E., Madaio, M., Maheshwari., N., Koedinger, K., & Ogan, A. (2018). Designing Appropriate Learning Technologies for School vs Home Settings in Tanzanian Rural Villages. In the Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (ACM COMPASS). [pdf]