Role: Creative Direction/Concept/ UX,UI,GUI Design/Web Development
(Personal project in progress)
Grape child is a social platform that brings cross-cultural inspiration and meaningful connection to humanitarian-minded professionals around the world. The main purpose is to empower children living in an underserved environment by providing free education. It combines crowd computing, crowd funding methods and virtual classroom environment, so that anyone from anywhere can become a proactive volunteer and teacher to help children in despair.
Grape Child will have a structure similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but the difference is that people around the world can search for projects that allow them to use talents and expertise to benefit children in needs. There will be various kinds of projects such as “Love Caroling,” music education for orphans in Isan, Thailand; “Dreaming Pencils and Sleeping Erasers,” education for abused and illiterate females in Afghanistan; technology education involving digital devices in Kenya, Africa; and many more.
Once a user joins the platform and completes a qualification test, he or she can create a new project, participate in existing projects, help with planning, funding, and executing a project, or simply share ideas and knowledge in their own unique way that ultimately supports and empowers children in need worldwide.
The name “Grape Child” is inspired by grape vines. We are like the vines, and the grapes are the children. In real life, a grape vine is only valuable for producing grapes, and in order to produce quality grapes, it must be continuously pruned of old unnecessary branches.
Like the vines, once we cut off the fixed ideas and rotten mentality and are nourished and nurtured in novel and humanitarian ways, we will step up and effectively serve underserved environments and help children overcome their unfortunate circumstances.
Projects
Interactive live map that shows all the projects around the world.
Communities
Home
In Mombassa, I served as an art teacher for twelve pure and innocent children. I taught them how to hold a brush, how to mix paints, and the other basics of art. They received very little education, let alone any art education, and the education they did receive was poor quality. We convened in a hut with openings on all sides, sitting on the dirt ground without desks. Quite honestly, it was a very challenging time for me, but I was deeply touched and humbled by the children’s enthusiasm and gratification about this learning opportunity, and their sincere appreciation to have me as their art teacher.
The project was published by united nations.
They wore rags for clothing and walked a long way without shoes to reach the school; some of them had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS as well.
In the first class, trying out using a brush for the first time. They didn’t know what brushes were. We taught them how to hold a brush, how to mix paints, and other basics of art.
Children’s colorful dreams and hopes started to unfold in forms of artworks and stories over the course.
A lot of them turned out to be very talented artists.
Drying their works under the sun.
I was shocked to find out that the simple lunch that we prepared was more like a meal that they would see only once or twice a year on holidays.
Gladly the children most enjoyed our last class – collaborative foot painting.Every child should have the chance to learn, and I hope this experience truly guided them to express their creativity, and find the hidden potentials in themselves.
