This article appeared in The Daily Star - Oct 24, 2016  (https://goo.gl/r0bg8V)

Arabic is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn and children often struggle to acquire Arabic reading and writing skills, complete their course requirements at school and achieve good grades. Siroun Shamigian, founder of Kamkalima, adopted the mission of making Arabic learning more enagaging and easier for students. Her goal is to help students from upper elementary to high school improve their Arabic communication skills with cloud-based software that supports personalized learning in reading and writing. “Kamkalima is an educational technology tool that targets school students, leveraging the latest advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to help students improve their writing skills,” Shamigian said. “Our AI system meets every student at his/her own level – and offers ‘intellitips,’ or smart tips that respond to every student’s specific learning needs. These tips help students identify their mistakes, learn about correct language usage, and enrich their vocabulary and language repertoire,” she added. The 43-year-old entrepreneur noted as well that one way to improve writing is by supporting reading. However, a lot of the reading material within school textbooks today is old and students have difficulty relating to it. “We want to change this by providing students with dynamic reading resources and support for students to write about topics that inspire them,” she said. Kamkalima is designed to support, rather than replace teachers. The new technology serves schools by working to improve student engagement and improve student outcomes in Arabic. “We know how hectic and time consuming it can be for teachers to prepare exciting lessons, especially since quality Arabic resources are not always readily available. This is why we have modules and lesson plans in place to make teachers’ lives easier,” she said. Shamigian explained that the software also assesses the types of mistakes made by students in the classroom and provides feedback and analysis to inform better planning. “We provide teachers with statistics and analytics about the types of errors made by students and the most common mistakes which help instructors make good decisions about which skills to focus more on for better outcomes.” she said. In Shamigian’s opinion, the software can create more visibility and recognition for great student work. “We will also be running writing competitions among schools and showcasing the best in an interschool digital library,” she said. Shamigian started her career at a very young age. “I started teaching at the age of 18 because I had to pay for my university education,” she said. A veteran science teacher, her passion for technology earned her the position of education technology coordinator at a private school in Beirut. “I love teaching and I love technology, so I put them together and it went very well,” she said. “I became much better at it over the years and the school administration and I decided it was time to get the whole school ready for technology. So I joined a team of three people and our job was to lead schoolwide adoption of education technology,” she added. Shamigian said that the biggest challenge at that time was to help Arabic teachers use technology to facilitate their work because of the lack of tools. “This is how we came up with the idea of Kamkalima in 2014. Then it took me nine months to hire a team to build the first testing version,” she said. She added that the first version was developed with teachers and students. “We got nine schools, over 600 students and more than 25 teachers to test it. In May 2016, after eight months from the [start of the] testing period, we hired a third party [user experience and user interface] specialist to do the analysis of the testing period and this helped us detect the things that needed to be improved,” she explained. Kamkalima today has nine employees including Arabic teachers, graphic designers, developers and educational technologists. Shamigian said that Kamkalima is ready to launch and 49 schools have already registered on its platform, including a number of schools in Dubai, where Kamkalima will soon launch. “Dubai is a good destination for us because they focus on Arabic at schools. Since our software does not rely on a specific curriculum but on the skills of writing, there is no constraint for scaling across countries,” she said. Kamkalima was initially funded with $100,000 but Shamigian will also be receiving additional funding from iSME, a program by Kafalat and IM Capital which provides matching capital, equity guarantee, as well as support programs to a broad range of qualified early businesses and investors. IM Capital is funded by USAID under the Middle East and North Africa Investment Initiative, aiming to improve access to finance for startups. “The new funds will be used to pay for full-time employees in addition to making improvements to the software,” she said.