Welcome to Project Connect mapping game

There are approximately 6 million schools in the world, but nobody knows where all of them are. We want to use the power of crowdsourcing to map and validate the location of these schools. For more information on the mission of Project Connect, visit our website.

Despite their varied structures, many schools have features that can help you identify a building as a school, whether it is the shape of the building, a group of buildings with the same colored roof, or nearby sport courts or playgrounds. See examples of schools on a map, learn to identify the most common set of features and hone in your school mapping skills!

UNICEF partners with country governments to obtain the coordinates of locations that might be schools or might not. Right now, players like you are helping us determine whether these locations are indeed schools. We have other tools to help us do this (e.g. ML models, apps where teachers and students around the world can send us geolocations of their schools, and more). Once enough players have helped us figure out which locations are schools, we can start enhancing our methods so we can determine whether any location, not just locations sent to us, is a school.

The main sources of data for the game are country governments. Project Connect works very closely with governments to gather existing data from different local stakeholders. The accuracy of the data we receive varies from country to country and it is very time consuming for an individual to manually validate all the locations one by one. That’s why the game will help us crowdsource the task – and eventually have automated machine learning models do the validation.

Right now, we are gathering data to determine what is the yes/no ratio we need for the same location to reach some confidence level that the location contains a school, and the same to reach some confidence level that the location does not contain a school. We are using a dataset that has been manually validated by a trained team of "data mappers" as ground truth for this initial validation and for determining the yes/no thresholds. The more users play the game and the more answers we have, the better we’ll be able to define these thresholds. On the other hand, no single person will have the power to validate a school alone.

The ratings will be used in the following ways:

1. for locations that are rated with a high number of "NO", this information will be sent to the government (our main source of data) and we’ll work with them to correct the geolocation tagging of the corresponding schools
2. locations that are rated with high number of "NO" and "YES" will be used to train our ML algorithms.
3. for locations that are rated with high number of "UNSURE", we will consider that satellite imagery is not sufficient to determine that the location contains a school or not and they won’t be used to train our ML algorithms.

For now, only the greatest reward of supporting the Project Connect mission. In future development, we plan to build leaderboards and a reward system that is integrated with other Digital Public Goods.