XPRIZE Foundation / Competition infrastructure
Submission tools, an SDK and analytics for XPRIZE.
We helped XPRIZE build digital infrastructure for its adult-literacy competition: submission management, an entrant SDK and a shared analytics platform.
Explore the story â
01 / The challenge
Different entries. A shared need for evidence.
Running a technology competition requires a way to coordinate submissions and compare information from different entrants. XPRIZE needed connected tools to support its adult-literacy prize.
More about the challenge
The challenge was to give the organizers an operational view while establishing a consistent way to collect relevant usage information from the participating applications.
- Project
- XPRIZE Foundation
- Our contribution
- Product strategy & engineering
- People using it
- Competition organizers, entrants & evaluators
- Engagement
- Competition infrastructure
The mission behind the platform
A bigger opportunity to learn.
The Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE challenged teams to make mobile learning useful for adults improving their reading skills. The $7 million competition ran from 2015 to 2020, with the aim of measuring literacy gains over a 12-month period.
That ambition made evaluation infrastructure essential. Twenty Ideas helped XPRIZE connect submissions, application data and analysis so different entries could be assessed within a shared framework.
Competition dates, prize purse and purpose: XPRIZEâs official competition overview.
02 / Product work
A shared foundation for evaluation.
Submission management, an entrant SDK and analytics support the adult-literacy competition.
03 / Inside the work
Build the infrastructure around evaluation.
We participated in planning around the prize committeeâs goals, constraints and rollout. The resulting technical approach connected a submission-management application, an SDK for entrants and an analytics platform.
The work connected classroom activity with the research process, giving the competition a digital platform for collecting and reviewing participation.
The evaluation infrastructure
- 01
Connect the entries.
An SDK gives participating applications a shared integration point.
- 02
Collect the evidence.
Application activity becomes information the evaluation team can use.
- 03
Support the analysis.
A common foundation helps the team examine the submissions.
A simplified explanation of the platformâs role.
04 / A product decision
Analytics with a side of SDK
The custom SDK gave participating applications a shared way to provide usage information. We built a custom analytics platform that brought that data into views for organizers and evaluators, helping conduct the prize and compare entries. The work focused on collection, reporting and the infrastructure around judging.
05 / Our contribution
The competition set the question.
We connected the evidence.
XPRIZE brought the adult-literacy competition and its evaluation needs. Twenty Ideas contributed strategy and engineering across submission management, an entrant-facing analytics SDK and the platform for reviewing participation data.
A shared collection approach connected information from separate learning apps to the organizersâ reporting workflow. Our contribution was evaluation infrastructure, distinct from building an entrantâs literacy intervention or winning the prize.
Under the surface: how this project was built
Entrant integration
An Android analytics SDK gave participating applications a shared way to provide usage events.
Collection and reporting
Kotlin and Kafka formed part of the analytics platform and its event-processing architecture.
Competition coordination
The Android work included campaign tracking, randomized assignment and a multilingual interface.
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