Juanraul Cadilloleon

Juanraul has taken an innovative and technologically oriented approach to improving educational standards in his village and school. Peru has traditional teaching methods in the early years that have been held to disadvantage students relative to those throughout the rest of the world and Latin America, because they make it difficult to overcome obstacles in basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Juanraul’s approach is to use computer technology to develop STEM skills through mathematics games, augmented reality books, and even through students creating their own video games. He has developed a platform for the students to write, illustrate and share stories socially on the web. This process involves the development of various skills (such as collaborative work) in an ecosystem that encourages the sharing of information and knowledge.

For the production of short stories for the first grade, Juanraul’s “start writing” test resulted in improvement from the pre- to post-test by 70% of the students. Over the years, the students’ self-esteem, communication skills and math skills have improved. This work has led to international and national prizes, both on a personal level for Juanraul and as a class. Juanraul was winner of the Educared International Contest 2010, the Educared International Award 2011, and the Master Who Makes a Mark Award 2014.

If awarded the prize, Juanraul would use the funds to launch an organization in Peru that is aimed at developing strategies and tools for children to learn to code. At the moment, he would like to improve his existing platform and increase the bandwidth, and he would develop a prototype for educational use of artificial vision on the Web.