Learning Roots and Shoots ® is a Kiwi Invention that was awarded the top NZ Early Childhood Council / Telecom Innovation Award in 2013, and presented by the Minister of Education.
The Innovation
Parents of three pre-schoolers at the time, Nikeeta and Dr Darius Singh, invented this patented technology. It gives parents at an ECE centre a unique advantage over any parent in NZ they can visualise their child’s learning progress and see it literally growing on the branches of their child’s live learning tree.
When we first approached their childcare centre, Chrysalis to present our KidReports Classroom Management Software, they showed us version one of Learning Roots and Shoots- we were immediately sold! It became clear that LRS could compliment KidReports well in helping hundreds of centres with their day to day operations, hundreds of teachers with quality evaluations and reflections, and thousands of parents with a better understanding and visualisation of their child’s progress towards school readiness along the Ministry of Education’s ECE curriculum.
The challenge with new verison
Our software development team took charge of software integration and redevelopment. The challenge was to build the program using Google App Engine and other open source technologies which had served the LRS team well for the past few years. We rewrote the entire software using updated technology like HTML canvas where visual representation updates robotically based on data input.
The final outcome
We’re now able to offer centres their own choice of curriculum when implementing our parent portal. Each centre can have the default Ministry based ECE curriculum or modify it to suit their own defined curriculum, goals and learning outcomes.
The best part of the project was how labels on each child’s visual roots and shoots (branches) also changes according to the curriculum chosen by each centre. This allows them to report at a deeper level on learning stories, learning outcomes for each child, curriculum implementation by centre and teachers for different age group.
Our end to end solution offers freedom to all childcare centres:
This Learning Roots and Shoots® solution is developed for the ECE Sector- but it can be used across primary and secondary schools, for teacher registration and appraisal journeys, in businesses and organisations that want to visualise outcomes and get comprehensive reports to reflect and review on past activities to better plan for the future.