International IT security, data and analytics-software organisation, Rapid7, has donated $USD100,000 to UC's STEM Education Research Centre to roll out its ground-breaking Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) program to schools in Canberra and surrounding NSW—from Queanbeyan to Gundaroo, Braidwood and back.
ELSA is currently expanding its program beyond pre-school to integrate into early primary school across the country. Following Australia's black summer and the impact of the pandemic, Rapid7's generous donation allowed ELSA to pilot the innovative technology-based education program to kindergarten classes across the ACT and New South Wales.
"The support from Rapid 7 enabled us to pilot ELSA in kindergarten classes in communities across different locations," said Centenary Professor Thomas Lowrie, Director of ELSA. "Despite a year where many children did not physically attend school for periods of time due to COVID-19, we saw large gains in spatial skills and a transfer to numeracy achievement over the 18-week program."
From remote indigenous communities to regional towns and urban areas, ELSA has already provided all Australian children equal opportunity to access the pedagogically rich and technologically innovative program. To date, more than 11,000 children have engaged with ELSA—enabling cultural and contextual learning, irrespective of where they live. The program encourages children and educators to create their own content (UGC) within the apps that reflects their life and community.
While Rapid7's core business uses comprehensive real-time data collection, advanced correlation, and unique insight into attacker techniques to strengthen an enterprise's ability to defend against cyber-attack, its core values extend to the philanthropic endeavours in the form of Rapid7GivesBack.
The AFR Award-nominated ELSA apps have been designed so that children can direct their own play while building capacity in spatial and logical reasoning in STEM, simultaneously collecting children's STEM literacy data in a play-based way, on a scale not seen before in technology research.
"Through this funding, we were able to develop the program and examine how we could address the cultural and contextual needs of children and teachers in both very large schools and in small schools with multi-age classrooms to determine how ELSA could work effectively in a broad range of contexts," said Centenary Professor Lowrie.
ELSA is a project of the STEM Education Research Centre (SERC) under the University of Canberra Faculty of Education.
