The Interledger Community 🌱: Nicole Li

Elementari — Grant Report #2 (Final)

Nicole Li — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 22:57:20 +0000

Hello everyone! 👋

It's time for our final grant report, and we have so much to share with you all. In the past few months, we've been busy with tech development inspirations, traveling, forging amazing new partnerships, and figuring out our roadmap for the next couple of years. It's not too much to say we've been just on fire the last couple of months (and mostly in the good, passionate kind of way). 🔥

We're still are committed to build Web Monetization into Elementari and making it more accessible, collaborative, and open as possible.

Project Update

While there were some bumps starting (and still some bumps going), we have loved being part of the Web Monetization community (I'm definitely a lurker reading the posts). The Grant for the Web has not only enabled us to build in a new Web Monetizable pathway for educators and artists to contribute their content, but also allowed us the freedom to reflect about how we can make our platform more accessible and open for all users.

The Flops and Struggles
🤔 For us, the largest struggle has always the UI/UX, and in particular the proper messaging of what exactly is Elementari to our target audience - K12 educators.

This struggle has also extended to Web Monetization as a whole. We have learned that the struggle is not just about adopting a novel idea; it is about not being vetted by known institutions, not being currently used in mass, and not being able to clearly answer the question of "what's in it for me - right now."

🎨 One of our key activities, Art Contests, unfortunately turned out to be a flop. What sounded like a good idea on paper turned out to be not a good use of our time or resources. We ran the Art Contests a total of 3 times and terminated them. However, we hope this is a blessing in disguise, as we now have the opportunity to do something bigger in conjunction with national and state level partners by funding micro-grants to create Web Monetized lesson plans for our platform.

The Wins and Highlights
💻The software development side of things is "as expected". So it counts as a win? When developing software, we expect bugs, and typically a solution is pretty straightforward (though it often takes more time than planned). All in all, we've completed the majority of our software development and have developed additional features to make Elementari just more accessible and fun.

👥 Attending two education conferences was a turning point for us, as we were able to directly engage with education influencers and decision-makers. This gave us a better vision of where we want to take Elementari, how we can integrate Web Monetization, and how partnerships can spearhead these efforts moving forward (more on that in Communications).

Overall though, our struggles have led us to a deeper reflection and are now considered essential growing pains. We are therefore grateful for Grant for the Web in allowing us to learn from these failures as we continuously improve.

Progress on objectives

Though our overarching objectives did not change, some of our approaches towards them have especially regarding communications. See the Communications section on how we've made the change of promoting our Contests to Partnerships with Micro-grants.

📋 Quick Recap! 📋

Help Center completed and source code released.
Web Monetization for artists and educators completed.
New lesson plan library creation flow
Web Monetization discussions with key K12 educators
Contests Failure => New Collaborations + Microgrants? See Communications Section.
Elementari Boosts. See What’s Next Section

We're extremely excited since the last couple months have been a breakthrough for us. We're starting many long term collaboration projects with national and state level educational organizations, many who serve underrepresented students (more in Communication Section). We've also done a lot development outside of the grant scope on our authoring tool to make Elementari more accessible and fun (check them out below because they are cool).

Key activities

ℹ️ Help Center Completed ℹ️

Thanks to the Interledger Foundation YouTube Channel, we were able to find awesome intro videos by the Artist Rescue Trust. It was exactly what we were looking for from our first Grant Report.

Elementari Web Monetization — Grant Report #1

Nicole Li ・ Oct 20 '22 ・ 11 min read

#grantreports

However with to the recent news on Coil, we have removed those articles. Until Fynbos or another Provider is ready, our Help Articles related to Web Monetization will be hidden, and we will be on standby. We still keep our general "What is Web Monetization" and include Web Monetization in our "How to be an Elementari Contributor" page once we have rewritten them without the Coil focus.

Help Center Development Stack:

Nuxt 3 for Full Static Generation

Nuxt Content for easy article writing in markdown

Vuetify to make everything pretty

Automatic deployments through Netlify

Zero running costs - it's totally free!

Check out our open-source Help Center repository! 👀

✍️ Lesson Plan Editor ✍️

Our lesson plan editor is completed. However, this may evolve (again) in the next few weeks after meetings with different organizations as we focus on being accessible to students of disabilities / diverse learning needs and aligning to the new state standards for computer science.

💰 Web Monetization Enabled for Educators and Artists 💰

Web Monetization is enabled for contributing educators (lesson plans) and artists (art or music). We do require all artists or educators to first be whitelisted by us before being able to contribute to Elementari, mostly for safety purposes as most of our users are children. We still see lots of potential in the educational world adopting Web Monetization. More on that in communications.

** 😎 Just Some Cool Development on Elementari 😎**
Make reading literally interactive. From what we've heard and investigated, we seem to be the only creation tool that implements speech recognition as a way to interact with content - pretty cool.

Elementari

@elementari

🎇Create interactive #readaloud books! By using our new #coding event block - "On pronounce", you can have the computer listen for certain letters, words, or phrases.
We even have templates (such as the one in the video) to help you get started! #STEM #reading

22:22 PM - 03 Jan 2023

Awesome pre-made templates to speed up creation

Elementari

@elementari

🎉Jumpstart your interactive story or game with Page Templates! With 60+ templates to choose from~

Let us know what kind of #coded templates you are looking forward to next!

10:41 AM - 04 Jan 2023

We've also added 9 new text effect animations and a new event block, On Collision.

Communications and marketing

🌟 Consulting and Marketing Outreach 🌟
We’ve contracted Rachelle Dené Poth, JD, MSEd, Twitter @Rdene915 for some educational consulting work and widening outreach for our art contests. She has included Elementari in her many conference presentations such as the past ISTE, TCEA, FETC, and more. She has also included Elementari her recent blog posts such as the one on Getting Smart.

🎨 Art Contests Failure 🎨
The Art Contests sounded like a wonderful plan. Running them would increase the number of diverse artworks on our platform, market Elementari to a wider audience, and introduce the concept of web monetization to educators, students, and artists alike. A win for everyone right? Well unfortunately - it was just a flop.

Despite heavy marketing (through social media promotion, webinar mentions, conference mentions, newsletters, mailing lists), we did not have many submissions past the first contest #UseTech4Good. There were very little submissions from classrooms and almost no submissions from adults. From those submissions, there were almost no art of quality that would benefit the platform and for others to use without intense clean-up on our part. Furthermore, we did not see views of the art contest convert into an increase in sign-ups while running the art contests. and felt that those who landed on the page just bounced out. Therefore, we decided to shelve these contests after running it for 3 times as the return on investment was just not there.

If the primary objective was the increase the number of diverse artworks, it would be better to just commissions some artists (as is the case for many other grantees). However, we still want to be able to reach a wider audience with these funds. This has led to the idea behind micro-grants for Web Monetized Lesson Plans (see more below).

👨‍🏫 Conference Insights - Interest in Web3? 👩‍🏫
Like I mentioned, the past couple months have been exciting. In January, I exited my development cave to directly talk to educators in person. I attended TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) and was on a panel at Infosys CrossRoads which has led to key insights to the state of K12 Computer Science Education and many educators' desire to learn more about innovative tech - Web3, AI, crypto, NFTs to name a few.

In one session at TCEA, "Blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs, Web3: What do Educators Need to Know? Bring STEM to Every Classroom", there were probably a hundred educators in the room. A common theme amongst the questions at the end of the sessions was "How can we prepare students for 'the real world'"? and "How can we enable our creative students ways to monetize their work?" The presenters mostly focused on the creation and then selling of NFTs. I, of course, brought up Web Monetization after the talks. 😉

I am though very intrigued by the amount of sessions and the amount of people who were interested in these topics at a conference geared for K12 educators. There was even a featured speaker session that included Web3 as well (see below post). It would definitely be worthy of investigating if there is a similar interest in Higher Ed conferences.

Steve Isaacs

@mr_isaacs

The evolution of Web1 to Web3 according to ⁦@TheTechRabbi⁩ #tcea #tcea23 #decentralization

17:09 PM - 31 Jan 2023

👨‍🏫 Partnerships with Nation/State-wide Organizations 👩‍🏫
What is great about conferences though is that the person you talk to usually can't run away or just be too busy to even answer your email. They have their time blocked off to be there, and it is easier to establish a first contact or move forward with a partnership. From the two conferences, I have established a long term partnership to demo/train Elementari for state-wide policy makers and teacher trainers. We also plan to co-develop lesson plans according their new state learning standards. I am currently setting up schedules for New York and Florida, and possibly in talks with people Texas, Iowa, among others. These of course are long term partnerships - some with rollouts in 2024.

Infosys USA

@infosysusa

2023 #InfyXRoads has officially kicked off in the @InfosysUSA Phoenix Innovation Center; Gathers over 200 trailblazers in CS, STEM and Maker education, as we push the frontier of digital skills education.
Read more bit.ly/3q7ncfN #PassionforCS #CSEquity #DigitalEquity

16:22 PM - 07 Feb 2023

Nicole Li

@nikorawrs

Looking forward to joining this discussion with fellow distinguished panelists at the 2023 #InfyXRoads! Stay tuned as we uncover how #storytelling, #games and hands-on activities can ignite interests in #CS that are personal and meaningful for students. @InfyFoundation

17:43 PM - 04 Feb 2023

🤝 Improving Accessibility through Collaboration 🤝
I am also establishing collaborations with Deaf Kids Code, Tech Kids Unlimited (for neurodiverse), and an accessibility expert/researcher for the blind. These collaborations aim to make Elementari more accessible and also create lesson plans for teaching computer science to all students. Once again, the micro-grants has been of interest to all of these groups.

Through these collaborations, we have gained valuable insights, identified areas where we can improve our practices, and ensured that our project is accessible to as many people as possible.

What’s next?

🚀 Elementari Boosts - Web Monetization 🚀
In our original proposal, we wanted to experiment into Elementari boosts (similar to Cinnamon Boosts). Unfortunately from the state
of Fynbos from the IFL calls in December and January, it didn't seem ready yet. We still believe that this is the way to go with Elementari - as we will profit share our paid subscriptions with our contributors.

💰 Micro-grant Lesson Plans - Web Monetization 💰
We'd like to repurpose our contest funds to become micro-grant funds, which we'll use to fund the creation of web monetized lesson plans. We're in talks with different organizations to set each lesson at around $50-100 per one-hour lesson. We hope that these large governmental / non-profit organizations can spread the word of the micro-grants and Elementari.

For all of our Web Monetized endeavors, we will be waiting for Fynbos or another Provider. I'm looking to hear all the updates in the ILF calls (I was only able to make the past December and January ones).

🌟 Accessibility and Inclusivity 🌟
We're particularly focused on collaborating with others to improve accessibility. Our goal is to make Elementari as inclusive as possible. We want everyone to have the opportunity to access and benefit, regardless of any disabilities or other barriers.

What community support would benefit your project?

🤝 Collaboration with the Community 🤝

Collaboration is key to our project's success, and we're always looking for like-minded folks to join forces with us. 🤜💥🤛 P.S. We're always on the lookout for people who can help us make Elementari more accessible!

📣 Sharing the Love 📣

We're grateful for any support from our community in spreading the word about Elementari. Whether you're a teacher, student, or just someone who loves interactive stories, we think you'll love our project! 😍 We're also on the lookout for artists who want to collaborate with us to create even better stories. So if you're an artist, reach out and let's make something amazing together! 🎨

Additional comments

Thoughts on Web Monetization - Ramblings
It's late at night and I want to just share a rambling. I've noticed some similarities between the adoption of Web Monetization and educators adopting Elementari on a large scale.

One of the biggest challenges with Elementari is the fear of the term "Computer Science." It's unfamiliar, and some people are intimidated by it. However, if I just say Elementari is like Google Slides, but you can make it interactive. For some reason, it works. And after teachers make their first interactive page, you can tell them that created an algorithm and it aligns to Computer Science learning standards. They coded - and they didn't even know it. 🤯

So bringing it back to Web Monetization - As Web Monetization is still not part of our vocabulary (even among very tech oriented folks), maybe the key is having creators Web Monetize their content without even knowing it?

At the end of the day, creators want to know "What's in it for me," and we need to focus on incentives, as @graeme mentioned in his post.

Web-Monetization Learnings: Vision vs Incentives 🤑

graeme for Prototypr ・ Feb 8 ・ 4 min read

#webmonetization

Our approach to Web Monetization will be to make the parallel to traditional publisher (something that's more familiar with people) - we pay creators a micro-grant to develop an open lesson plan and they'll receive something similar to royalties through Web Monetization. It'll just have all the additional benefits of supporting open web, privacy, and micropayments that come with it.

I feel extremely lucky to have the opportunity to journey into Web Monetization with Grant for the Web. I'm looking forward to how the Web Monetization landscape will evolve and how we can grow with it. Elementari is here for the long term, and we're always excited to grow and build with you all for a more open and inclusive web. 💕

Thank you for believing in us and supporting us. We can't wait to see what's next! 🚀

Submit and Share our Art Contests

Nicole Li — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 19:49:51 +0000

Submit to one of our Art Contest and get a chance to win some awesome prizes~

More info and submit at https://elementari.com/artcontests

Please share on Twitter!

Elementari

@elementari

4⃣ Art contests between now and January 20th
🎉Win individual and #K12 class prizes
➡️Learn more and submit at elementari.com/artcontests

#k12artchat #education #STEAM

14:17 PM - 31 Oct 2022

Elementari Web Monetization — Grant Report #1

Nicole Li — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 17:30:56 +0000

Project Overview

👋 Hello everyone! You can read about Elementari. About Us here:

Hello from Elementari / About Us

Nicole Li ・ Oct 10 ・ 5 min read

#community

Project Update

While there have been delays, we’re excited to announce that we are making progress on adding support for web monetization for our educators and artists (in addition to making Elementari just better).

Quick Recap:
ℹ️ Help Center. Our website finally has a Help Center and it includes some articles on web monetization! The source code will be released shortly.
👩‍🏫 New Lesson Plan Creation + Library. The development of the flow from creation to submission to publishing took longer than expected, but we are in the local testing phase with web monetization enabled.
🎨 Art Contests are launched!

For the technical developments, we’ve been mostly working on how educators can publish their web-monetized lesson plans on Elementari, developing our Help Center, and doing a lot of backend work (so there's not much to visually show).

A large focus for us is refining the communication of web monetization to a general non-techie audience. To do so, we’ve done a lot of reading, held some informal interviews with educators, are developing our survey, launched our art contests, and scheduled our first round table on web monetization. Finally, we’ve spent the past couple of weeks taking time to get to know other platforms, meeting with the web monetization community, and finding ways to collaborate long term.

Progress on objectives

Our objectives can be broadly categorized into:

Development

Help Center Development and Articles - 80% completed
Web Monetization for Educators via Coil including the lesson plan contribution UI and flow - 70% completed
Web Monetization for Artists via Coil with probabilistic revenue sharing - 60% completed
Elementari Boosts (experiments in Web Monetization: Coil tipping or other) - not started.

Communications

5 Art Contests between October to January - all contests launched.
Survey for Educators / Students regarding Web Monetization - in progress
Lesson Plan Contests - not started
Webinar / Round Tables for Educators - in progress

Key activities

⭐️Developing a Help Center

You can see it at help.elementari.com.

When writing our proposal, we planned to just pay for a knowledge base service. However, with increasing subscription prices and a decision to keep Elementari as lean as possible, we’ve developed our own Help Center (though development time has been increased).
We will release the source code and articles as open-source so it can be a base for any other web-monetization platforms.

Development Stack:

Nuxt 3 with Nuxt Content (though currently in the release candidate stage) for its Full Static Generation and for articles that can be written in markdown. Vuetify to make things prettier. Automatic deployments through Netlify (though it’s easy to do with any other hosting such as AWS).

This means our Help Center has zero running costs, helping us for long term sustainability. Source code and documentation will be provided as open source.

We will be releasing the Github Repo most likely next week as we finalize some additional web monetization articles / resources.

⭐️Writing Help Center Articles

Originally, we planned for the Help Center articles to be done throughout the grant period. While some work remains - we’ve front loaded the work so we can refer to it when communicating about web monetization.

From interviewing our focus group of Elementari Educators and Artists, none of them knew what web-monetization was. This led us to spend time researching how other platforms have communicated web monetization, asking the community such as Erica for resources, and finally crafting our Help Articles. We will be adding videos later on to better illustrate things.

⭐️ Art Contests

We’ve worked with our educators to come up with the contest guidelines and have begun our art contests! See Communications / Marketing section for more on this.

⭐️ Improve lesson plan editor, publishing flow, and library view

TL;DR: A lot of development work backend (mostly) and frontend to make something that looks simple like this:

Things can always be improved and will be over the coming months as we test it some more.

In detail about some of our development and struggles:

Backend Migrations
Previously, we had a backend model for curriculums and assignments. Curriculums were the full length lessons we would publish for educators of the platform to use. Educators could view these curriculums and then set them as an assignment for their classroom students to view. This was back when we didn’t really know how to code anything… So a considerable amount of time was spent figuring out how to clean up and migrate the existing models into just one model.

Frontend Flow for Educators / UI
We spent time speaking to a few of our Elementari Ambassadors (educators who constantly use and promote Elementari) regarding the flow for viewing lessons, creating lessons, and assigning lessons to their classroom. From their feedback, we’ve improved the frontend flow for educators while adding the additional functionality of submitting their lesson to be published on the Elementari site. It was a big struggle to maintain simplicity for any educator to still create private assignments for their class, but enabling the option to publish a full blown curriculum.

Lesson Plan Form UI
This is still an ongoing process as the UI needs to be:

Simple enough to create an assignment for the classroom privately (the least amount of fields possible)
Complex enough to publish a full blown lesson plan publicly with all resources (video, sample story, etc), specific teacher instructions, and learning standards. We're now on the 3rd revision...

Lesson Plan Library UI
You can now view the new (but hasn't really changed much visually) lesson plan library here.

⭐️ Setting up probabilistic revenue sharing
Currently all artists are automatically credited when their work is used in a story (page by page and for the full story). You can take a look at the image for the crediting in the story Things I've Forgotten by 5th grader Supernova (it's pretty good!).

We will be developing probabilistic revenue sharing for these artists when a story with their work is viewed. We've already done a lot of the backend work necessary to set up the share percentage of a story. Up next is just setting up the payment pointers and testing.

Communications and marketing

Elementari Intro Post on Interledger Community

Official Elementari Web Monetization Announcement

📣 Art Contests

We have focused on marketing our Art Contests. These contests will help us increase the number of diverse artworks on our platform, market Elementari to a wider audience, and introduce the concept of web monetization to educators, students, and artists alike.

We aim to generate interest in the Interledger Foundation and web monetization through these contests. The Interledger Foundation is mentioned in the art contest announcement page, social posts, and when talking about the contests in Elementari Webinars and Events. We plan to send a digital badge and letter to all artists who submitted in the contests with the Interledger Foundation logo and mission as well as an intro to web monetization. In addition, we directly ask adult contest participants if they are interested in being a web monetized contributor on Elementari to be put on our waitlist / mailing list.

See the announcement page with information on all five of the contests. We also have a banner at the top of our website highlighting the contests.

First Contest #UseTech4Good

Our first contest (co-hosted with the Digital Citizenship Institute) is wrapping up, with a deadline of October 24th for people to submit.

October Elementari Art Contest - #UseTech4Good

Nicole Li ・ Oct 3 ・ 1 min read

#community #art #contest

Deann Poleon

@deannpoleon

1s being creative in showing how to use #tech4good @elementari @m_drez @HighlandLSC #edtechlsc twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

18:48 PM - 19 Oct 2022

Our co-host the Digital Citizenship Institute has done an awesome job in helping spread the contest. @gfam has also generously made sharing our tweet a challenge for his community, helping spread the word. Educational consultant Educator Alexander shared the contests via her newsletter. Our Elementari Ambassadors have shared via their private school mailing lists. Finally, some other educators are sharing the information at the upcoming NYSCATE Conference (November).

Here are some highlights and stats:

I also presented Elementari and Art Contests for Global Maker Day.

Katie McNamara

@katiejmcnamara

Art AND Prizes!!!! #GlobalMakerDay See the fab details at elementari.com/artcontests @nikorawrs

18:05 PM - 18 Oct 2022

📣 Round Table Discussion on Web Monetization

We are scheduling our first round table discussion the week of November 14th. We will be posting soon.

If you are interested in co-hosting with us and sharing your expertise, please feel free to contact me at nicole.li@elementari.com.

What’s next?

➡️Finalize Help Center Articles
While we did most of the development and articles for our Help Center, we still need some step-by-step video tutorials for web monetization (how to create a Coil account, how to set up your Uphold account, how to link your wallet on Elementari, etc). If people already have a good videos on this, please share.

We will also be putting up the Help Center (with some documentation) on a GitHub Repo soon for other organizations to use as a base.

➡️Implement payment pointers for Educators and Artists

Individuals can paste their payment pointer in their account settings. Payment pointers will be attached to their profile pages, lesson plans, and stories who have used their artwork (probabilistic revenue sharing).

➡️Elementari Boosts (experiments in Web Monetization - Coil tipping or other).
As part of our mission to promote arts, we aim to profit share up 70% with our contributors. We have always had profit-sharing in mind since the beginnings of Elementari. We plan to look into Coil tipping and Fynbos in ways to make this happen in a more sustainable and fair way.

We are open to all ideas on how we can easily tip / boost our contributors.

As many artists will not have payment pointers yet enabled. We are looking into ways to show the "payouts" they could have received from web monetization and provide a payout. @graeme from Prototypr has an interesting base to look at at in his Web Monetization Payouts for Individual Articles (Experimental).

➡️Continue Our Art Contests
We will continue our communications / marketing with our art contests. Please continue to share our contests out - We have a total of 5 that will be run during the grant period!

➡️Launch our Lesson Plan Contest
We plan to launch our lesson plan contests which can use the artwork from the contests soon.

➡️Wider Community Outreach
We will continue to have round tables / informational webinars on Web Monetization.

We are also finalizing our survey to educators / students and will be sending that out soon! Stay tuned for our survey so you can help us share.

We plan to create some simple slides for Educators to use that cover basics of Web Monetization / Open Web that they can use with their students.

➡️Grow User Base
Of course we still have business as usual in growing our platform user base and correcting bugs. As we have more users use Elementari (and therefore just more people reading stories and using lesson plans), there will be an interest in users to become Elementari Contributors web monetizing their content.

What community support would benefit your project?

❤️Please share our art contests (and even submit yourself)! We love seeing all of the entries! You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for any updates.

❤️We’d also appreciate any sharing of your content / resources / tips in helping make web monetization understandable for kids and grandparents alike. Does anyone have a pretty educational presentation on web-monetization?

❤️Like mentioned above, we are looking into ways to send money from Elementari to artists / educators (Elementari Boosts). If you are familiar or want to have discussions of different possibilities, please let me know.

Additional comments

💼Branding Kit
We've benefited from reading the research made by @hessel from Free Music Archive: FMA Explores How To Introduce Coil to Users and completely agree for the need of a "branding kit" for grantees. This will help all grantees have aligned messages and allow grantees to directly jump into their specific development. With the "branding kit", there should be explicit descriptions of the Interledger Foundation, Web Monetization, Coil, and digital wallets like Uphold.

There is also a need for a centralized location (even a google doc works) where we can contribute to presentations, images, infographics, etc that can be repurposed for our own organization (no need to rebuild the wheel).

If there are any good step-by-step videos on how to create a Coil account and Uphold wallet, then please share. As techie people, we tend to forget that a large population of users (both young and old alike) struggle with or have low confidence in basic technological tasks. Otherwise, we will be working on our own instructional videos for how to set up a Coil and Uphold account that can be shared for others to remix and reuse.

Coil Coupon
We also previously reached out about creating a template gift certificate with the Coil codes. Like regular cash / gift certificates it will include participating stores (or in this case websites). One of the shortfalls of Web Monetization now is that is that it is too innovative and too far from what most consumers are used to.

Just some thoughts

Recently, we received a retweet:

oasis

@kenoasis

Elementari is here to stay😌

Come and display your art 🎭 twitter.com/elementari/sta…

06:43 AM - 09 Oct 2022

Elementari @elementari
🎨To celebrate #DigCit, we're launching our art contests with @digcitinstitute with theme #UseTech4Good! All artists, K12 students/classrooms and adults, are invited to submit before October 24th for a chance to win awesome prizes. More info: https://t.co/PmHadrmSbv https://t.co/ULX5Ktnb9C

And it echoed some of the thoughts I've been having while navigating the Web Monetization space: which projects are actually here to stay? Once the grant money / period is over, which projects are the ones that will continue to live and continue developing? It's hard to build something polished in 6 months or even a year.

And while projects can continue to go grant surfing, the goal of course is sustainability. How are projects expecting to finance their running costs outside of grants (or are there just a ton of grants I'm completely missing out on). I'm looking forward to reading more and connecting with others regarding this point.

🤗 Thank you!
Thank you for all of your time @ericahargreave in helping us navigate the community (especially since we were a bit late to the party). I’ve had a great time knowing some members of the community and helping where I can. Being not pregnant (and not completely sick) does wonders for the amount of work that can be accomplished.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would just like to chat :)

Hello from Elementari / About Us

Nicole Li — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:08:43 +0000

Hello everyone!

Nicole here from the Elementari team! Our team is made up of myself and my husband David Li (but he doesn't do social media or communications - so you'll just hear from me). So, we’re like the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop (no VC funding nor interest in going down that route at all). All the development is done by us, enabling us to have full control over what Elementari is including its ethical position and mission driven philosophy.

This post is just to give the community some idea about what Elementari is and how we plan to integrate web monetization in hopes to leading to future connections and partnerships with the community!

While a lot of things have changed since we began Elementari from my thesis idea in 2015 (hey we didn’t even know how to build a website back then), we’ve held true to our mission:

Our Mission: Elementari promotes arts, literacy, and computational thinking in an engaging and collaborative way. We want anyone, even kids, to be able to write and code interactive stories. We're committed to building a platform where people can come together to read, write, collaborate, share, and remix stories designed for the screen. Elementari respects student privacy. We are compliant with COPPA, FERPA, and have no ads.

If you are interested, you can see some of the beginning of our journey in the first episode of @ericahargreave Sustainable Funding Series (interviewed in 2019).

Episode 1 of our Sustainable Funding Series, featuring Elementari

Erica Hargreave for Sustainable Funding ・ Feb 21 '21 ・ 1 min read

#sustainablefunding #fundingmodels #vlogcast #interview

Fun fact: I e-met Erica through reddit of all places when I randomly posted about our platform back in 2018. Just shows how you can meet people and make connections anywhere.

Our Sustainability Model

Freemium Model

We have a freemium model which has worked well. Individual teachers, schools, and districts can purchase software licenses to access premium features (accessing the entire library of illustrations/sounds, providing teacher feedback on stories, uploading their own images, etc). Currently the majority of our customers are based in the U.S.

One of our goals for the Web Monetization Grant is to experiment with tipping or ways to profit-share to our contributing educators and artists.

Partnerships / Grants

Recently, we received a partnership with Infosys Foundation USA and the Web Monetization Grant.

With the partnership with the Infosys Foundation USA, all training and professional development are hosted on their website the Pathfinders Online Institute. All educational material is freely available for anyone to view (once you create a free account on the Pathfinders Online Institute). This allowed us to fulfill a goal of ours - to move away from paid professional development for schools/districts and instead to focus on further development of the platform. You can view our announcement for the Storytelling through Coding 2022-23 Grant available to K-12 educators in the US.

If you know of any other grants that synergize with our mission of promoting arts, literacy, and computational thinking - please let us know!

Web Monetization Grant

Our project with web monetization was continuously postponed due to personal events (we wanted to get a dog, but we got a newborn instead - meaning little work got done).

As part of our web monetization grant, we are developing:

Web Monetization for Educators via Coil. This means opening up our lesson plan library so that anyone can view, use, and contribute lesson plan content that can be web monetized. Previously, there have been some universities who have inquired about contributing. Now, we can say yes! And to top it all off - they can web-monetize their content!
Web Monetization for Artists via Coil. Currently all artists are automatically credited when their work is used in a story (page by page and for the full story). We will be developing probabilistic revenue sharing for these artists when a story with their work is viewed.
Help Center. This help center includes articles on web monetization and how to apply to be an Elementari contributor for web monetization. The documentation and source code for our Help Center will be available as open-source material (headless CMS using Nuxt / Nuxt Content).
Elementari Boosts (experiments in Web Monetization - Coil tipping or other). As part of our mission to promote arts, we aim to profit share with our contributors. We have always had profit-sharing in mind since the beginnings of Elementari, and now we are seeing sustainable ways of implementing it thanks to web monetization. We are open to all ideas on how we can easily tip / boost our contributors.

You can read our grant announcement here.

In addition to technical development, we are running art contests, lesson plan contests, a survey targeting educators and their students, round table discussions, and developing web monetization communication slides for educators.

Please share our art contests and contribute any theme ideas you might have.

October Elementari Art Contest - #UseTech4Good

Nicole Li ・ Oct 3 ・ 1 min read

#community #art #contest

Interested in how Elementari works?

Here's a quick video that gives a brief overview:

We invite you to try it yourself though. There are no barriers (it's free to get started) for anyone to create, collaborate, code, and publish. You can check out some of these awesome stories:

Things I’ve Forgotten - an interactive visual novel created by a 5th grader.
A Yoga Adventure by the Sea - a kid’s book created by @loriyearwood from Sustainable Funding Series.

You can also find a course on Elementari on the web monetized StoryToGo Classroom site.

If you'd like to follow along with creating an interactive story (and listening to some educator stuff), I am holding free webinars on Storytelling through Coding on the following dates:

Community Exchanges!

I'd love to find more ways to collaborate with different organizations. I am also available to help anyone with my expertise in the K12 educational sector.

Also if anyone thinks they have a good blurb or graphics on what is web monetization, coil, etc - please share. I am struggling with explaining things easily to a generic non-techie audience.

Connect with me on social media!
Nicole: Twitter, LinkedIn
Elementari: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

October Elementari Art Contest - #UseTech4Good

Nicole Li — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 15:56:03 +0000

Art Contest - #UseTech4Good

Due: Monday October 24th at 5:00PM EST

How do you use technology for good? We've partnered up with the Digital Citizenship Institute as they are celebrating digital citizenship the entire month by hosting a month-long event around digital citizenship and the Global Goals.

This is the first of five art contests running from October to January.

Students K-12 can apply through this form.
Adults can apply through this form.

You can find the announcement with more information on the Elementari web page here.

Please share out on Twitter

Elementari

@elementari

🎨To celebrate #DigCit, we're launching our art contests with @digcitinstitute with theme #UseTech4Good!
All artists, K12 students/classrooms and adults, are invited to submit before October 24th for a chance to win awesome prizes. More info: elementari.com/artcontests

14:23 PM - 03 Oct 2022

You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for any updates.

Community Asks - Themes for Future Contests

Please feel free to suggest any Theme ideas that may be useful to you as all the artwork submitted will be released with a Creative Common license.

Theme Ideas for our Elementari Art Contests

Nicole Li for Elementari ・ Sep 30 ・ 1 min read

#discuss #community

Theme Ideas for our Elementari Art Contests

Nicole Li — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 14:47:01 +0000

Hi Everyone!

I'm Nicole from Elementari, an interactive story platform geared to teachers creatively engaging their students in literacy skills and coding as they create interactive stories and games using professional illustrations and sounds (elementari.com).

We've been working to enable Web Monetization on Elementari for our artists and our teachers.

As we introduce our community of artists to Web Monetization, we are hosting five art contests for kids and adults, starting in October and carrying through to January.

While we have already decided on a #UseTech4Good theme for October, we'd love your suggestions for themes for our other months. All the contest entries will include a Creative Commons license on them, so given that, are their image themes that would be useful to the community as a whole?

You can take a look at our contests page at https://elementari.com/artcontests. Feel free to share!

Drop your theme suggestions in the comments below.

Thanks so much!