Textbooks for primary and elementary schools often suffer in quality, especially in the natural sciences and in cultural aspects of social studies Yet they’re still horrendously over priced, hurting schools across the globe.
Creating an affordable textbook for any poverty stricken school across the globe, be it in northern Germany or southern Somalia, is the goal of the “Children of Our Earth” partnership in Bremen, Germany.
Two specific texts will be made in the following seven weeks, one dealing with natural sciences that contains exercises, illustrations, interactive elements and other media to entertain and educate; the other dealing with global culture, allowing students to write their own stories and upload them to share their culture.
The text will be (1) free online for access anywhere, (2) available on CD with interactive software intact for a small shipping fee, (3) available in print with modified “interactive” exercises. It will be exposed to extensive professional review to maintain accuracy and accessibility by children. The more products are sold in this project, the more books can be distributed across borders to children who not only need them, but desperately want them.
It will not be subject to insane licence agreements. Once you’ve bought a copy, it’s yours. You want to print it off? Go ahead. You want to copy it and share it? Go ahead. You want to use elements from it in your own work? Go ahead (although citations back to the authors might be nice if you please).
Comet Comics is now in charge of this venture.
Because Knowledge Should Be Public Domain
