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Children Digital Publishing Expo 2015 - Press Release
Submitted by sopio on 23 June 2015 - 8:25am
KAMPALA, June 10, 2015 – MixaKids Publishing has organized an Expo that will showcase creative writing and digital publishing by children in Uganda. The Expo is being organized by MixaKids in collaboration with the Directorate of Education & Social Services, Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and the key primary schools participating in the MixaKids programme.
The Expo, which will take place on June 20, 2015 at the Uganda Museum, is providing an opportunity to children from various schools in Uganda to showcase their writing and reading skills, published e-books and how to use the MixaKids digital publishing platform.
The invited audience includes school children, teachers, parents, civil society, government officials, and the general public. Starting at 8.30am, the Expo is expected to close at 5pm.
“MixaKids Expo 2015 is the first of its kind in East Africa targeting literacy and digital publishing by young children. This Expo opens up a new chapter into how our children interact with ICT to enhance their writing and reading skills including digital publication of their works,” said David Mushabe, Regional Director/CEO MixaKids.
At the Expo, children and their parents will enjoy interactive activities including live demo of flipping e-books authored by children, storytelling competitions, live illustration of selected stories, animation of cartoons, programmable robots, music, and much more. Lots of prizes including laptops, tablets, T-shirts etc are to be won by children participating in the selected event activities. Special care has been taken to ensure sufficient security and proper parking at the event. The event is free and open to the public.
About MixaKids
MixaKids is an innovative digital publishing platform for e-books and other digital content authored by children. The platform provides an opportunity to children in Africa to enhance their literacy and creative skills through storytelling. Incorporated in Uganda in 2014, MixaKids has quickly expanded their operations to Kenya and other East Africa countries.
Initially, the platform is targeting digital publishing amongst primary school going children but will scale up to secondary schools. Specifically, the platform seeks to:
- Enhance children's literacy skills through story writing and reading,
- Enhance children's ICT skills and usage of other digital resources,
- Build children’s entrepreneurship skills through digital/self-publishing,
- Promote children financial literacy and financial inclusion.
Please find more information at http://www.mixakids.com or contact us at:
UGANDA OFFICE
Plot 1-3 Coral Crescent,
Lower Kololo Terrace
PO Box 25780, Kampala
Tel: +256 312266748/7 Mob: 0772 833261
Email: ug@mixakids.com
KENYA OFFICE
2G, Commodore Office Suites,
Kindaruma Road, Kilimani
Box 25915-00100 GPO Nairobi - KENYA
Tel: +254 205 280015 Mob: 0722 766636
Email: ke@mixakids.com
Further information about MixaKids Platform
What inspired MixaKids?
Governments and various education stakeholders in Africa are deeply concerned about the impact of poor literacy levels amongst the school going children. Consequently, many of our children in various schools are graduating with hardly any ability to read and comprehend basic literature. On other hand, governments in Africa are increasing appreciating the benefits of ICT in education, and in deed countries like Rwanda and Kenya are already implementing the ‘One laptop per child’ schemes in order to boost ICT skills amongst their children. While deeply examining the above concern and need, we do realize that this presents an immense opportunity on how we can achieve better literacy levels and ICT skills in Africa.
It is now common knowledge that most children tend to be attracted to computers and other digital resources. It is also highly probable that this interest can be leveraged as an incentive to attract their attention to reading and writing. Therefore, it is this background that inspired the concept of “MixaKids” which is envisaged to provide an avenue for enhancing children’s skills both in literacy and the usage of ICT resources. Through MixaKids, children are able to write and digitally publish short stories as e-books for other children to read but at a small fee. The resultant fee is shared between the publishing platform and the child author thus creating further incentive for writing and reading.
How does MixaKids work?
The MixaKids platform allows children to submit their stories which are published as e-books for other children to purchase and read. Below is a brief of this works:
- The child submits a story through our website www.mixakids.com (you need to create a user account and be logged in). Your child can also submit his/her story to their class teacher at school.
- MixaKids edits and approves the story. The story MUST be original and not copied from the Internet or other books.
- MixaKids requests the child's guardian/parent's approval to publish the story. This is done by signing a publishing contract between the guardian/parent (on behalf of their child) with Mixa Kids Ltd.
- MixaKids creates illustrations for the approved story (children can create their own illustrations if they can).
- MixaKids creates the e-book and publishes it to www.mixakids.com platform.
- The e-book is available for purchase or rent by other readers across the world.
- The author is able to view (in real time) the e-book sales statistics under their user account on www.mixakids.com.
- Every quarter (3 months), the guardian/parent can request to withdraw the accrued sales income. For all approved withdraw requests, the funds are only remitted to the child's pre-registered Bank Account.
Please note that children are free to submit as many stories as they can. Adults who can write good children stories are welcome to submit theirs as well.
