BrilliantMindCatalyzer (*)

What one sentence best describes your idea?

Build and distribute some cheap IQ measuring devices to Third World children in order to entertain them and thus identify the brilliant ones.

Describe your idea in more depth.

It is necessary to design, build and freely distribute to Third World children some cheap devices that help to evaluate the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and altogether their logical thinking attitude. Device characteristics:

• should be cheap
• should be freely distributed to all children and only when possible to their teachers or tutors
• should have logical quizzes with increasing difficulty levels
• should give easily comparable results (e.g. the IQ or another measurement scale)
• should be easy to use for the children, without the help of adults or prior education
• should be usable by children of different age (e.g. from 6 to 14 years)
• should withstand several environmental stress conditions (heat, sand, water, etc)
• should have a good energetic autonomy (i.e. with small solar batteries).

We hope that several institutions and organizations will be economically caught up with investing time and money on these brilliant children to give them a complete education from the elementary school to the university. The education could be afforded in situ or abroad in foreign countries and could be planned separately in another project.

What problem or issue does your idea address?

The key problem can be summarized with a slogan:
"Intelligence without formation = wasted intelligence".
It is very probable that in Third World countries (i.e. Africa) there are many brilliant children that once educated could help humanity with their talent and culture. If there are few resources for the education and the formation, it is better to hock these resources on people that would draw the maximum benefits of it, in this case the brilliant children. BrilliantMindCatalyzer is the first screening of these children, performed without the help of the adults, as if it were a game. It should be noticed that there is not a unique screening step since a child could use BrilliantMindCatalyzer at any moment and only subsequently, when someone asks him (i.e. the organization interested in investing on the formation of brilliant minds) communicate the result. This makes the system very flexible.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?

• All the children using the BrilliantMindCatalyzer device would have a good time trying to solve the quizzes.
• All the children achieving the best results - if they're lucky and meet people or organizations that will deal with their education - would profit of a formation that otherwise would have been precluded to them.
• Humanity will benefit from their works.

What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?

• Design the software and the hardware of the devices that measure the IQ/logical skills.
• Plan and organize their distribution in the Third World.
• Identify the best system to collect the data measured.
• Organize educational programs from the elementary school to the university for the children that achieved the best results.

Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?

The optimal outcome is represented by schools (which reside in a Third World country, but also abroad) that are able to organize from the elementary school to the university the complete education of those brilliant children that otherwise would not have had access to a complete formation and whose cleverness would not have been successfully used.

A measurement method could be the number of children that successfully get co-opted for a complete and higher education thanks to BrilliantMindCatalyzer.

(*) BrilliantMindCatalyzer was a my proposal at Google Project 10^100.