LeVar Burton is Kickstarting his Reading Rainbow education program.
LeVar Burton and his Reading Rainbow Kickstarter team start their campaign video with a striking statistic: 1 in 4 kids in the US will grow up illiterate. We might not live in the future world of flying cars and jetpacks, but everyone should be able to read.
The overall goal of the team is to bring back Reading Rainbow for every child. Online content is being developed in the form of digital field trips and digital books that will be available for schools. Classrooms in need will receive the content free of charge.
Burton talks about the feedback he gets on current media – quality educational content is scarce. Framing the content that ran on television from 1983 to 2009 for today’s kids is a challenge that the team seems excited to meet.
Money raised from this campaign will be used for three main purposes: developing web content for the home, creating a classroom version for teachers and subsidizing the cost so that schools in need can use the content for free.
This campaign has seen heavy exposure in the media over the last week, and blew by its one million dollar goal in the first day. The stretch goal is now five million dollars, the point where 7500 classrooms will have free access to the content and Android, consoles, over the top boxes and the web will all be able to use the material.
Reading Rainbow was big in our house growing up even though it was geared more toward my younger siblings. The mission here is incredibly noble and also inspiring, and most engineers should be excited to help Geordi LaForge.
Several of the Kickstarter reward capitalize on Burton’s fame, from signed photos and Twitter follows all the way up to meet and greets. The most fantastic reward to me is a chance to wear Geordi LaForge’s famous visor and take the ultimate engineer’s selfie.