"So I wanted to be in a situation that 'I was there, I tried my best, maybe I failed, but I tried my best.'"Īlso working on the Polly release in Guinea are Nikolas Wolfe, Juneki Hong and Bhiksh Raj from Carnegie Mellon and Kimberly Phelan Royston, Emily Greem and David Kierski at the U.S. "I did not want myself to be in a situation like a year from this time to think that 'OK, I was there, I could have done something, but I did not try,'" says Raza. Last November wasn't a great time for Raza to start a new project. Polly's Africa debut was largely propelled by one of Rosenfeld's grad students, Agha Ali Raza. He knows people are forwarding messages to their friends, "but the numbers remain in the thousands, not in the hundreds of thousands." So the game is being tweaked to make it more appealing. Rosenfeld says Polly is catching on more slowly in Guinea than in Pakistan. The idea is to build on what health workers are doing on the ground.
Chipmunk sounds how to#
Instead of giving out employment information, Polly tells Guineans what to do if they suspect someone has Ebola, how to avoid getting Ebola and what to do when someone dies of Ebola. Last November, Rosenfeld started working on a version of Polly for the West African nation of Guinea, where Ebola is still a problem. "A few months later when we got 30 lines, we opened it again, gave the number to five people, and it took off to thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands."Īccording to the researchers, 20 percent of about 165,000 people playing the game also listened to the employment message. "Then within two weeks we had to shut down the system because we got 10,000 calls, we had only a single phone line and we couldn't maintain the volume. "We gave the number to 30 people ," says Rosenfeld.
To get started, all people had to do was call a local number. A few years ago, they used Polly in Pakistan to spread information about how to find a job. He and his colleagues developed Polly as a way to reach people who can't read. "Once we are spreading, we can add on top of that health messages or employment messages or other messages," says Roni Rosenfeld, one of Polly's creators.
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