UPDATE: This position has been filled

---

About the Organization

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India.

In the last few years, we have invested deeply in technology-based initiatives to further our mission. We are now looking for a Data Engineer as we significantly scale these initiatives.

About the Platform

StoryWeaver is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform and the platform source code are openly licensed. In two years, StoryWeaver has scaled from 800 stories in 24 languages to 20,000+ stories in 250+ languages by engaging with a community of users. We want every child to have access to quality reading resources in their own language.

StoryWeaver is being recognized as an emerging innovation that can transform the early literacy reader ecosystem globally. Our vision is for StoryWeaver to be the largest multilingual open library in the world for children by empowering communities to address the scarcity of reading resources in their mother tongue languages and scale the quantity and quality of content being produced.

Illustration by Joanna Mendes from 'Talking in Twos' written by Sarat Talluri Rao, published by Pratham Books

Job Description

We are looking for a passionate individual wanting to make a difference, one who believes that technology can be a powerful enabler in creating equitable access to resources. This role requires an individual contributor who can work effectively, both independently and collaboratively, in a team environment and deliver the project in a timely manner within allocated resources and budgets.

We are looking for a Data Engineer to work closely alongside our Product Development team and other internal teams. You will discover the insights within our data sets, and help us make smarter decisions to deliver better results for our end users.

In this role, you will be responsible for providing requirements for new features for collection of data, execute data validation checks, ensure data integrity, use statistical techniques to analyse and interpret data, take complete ownership of Google Analytics, identify trends and provide insightful reports to internal and external audience.

We’re looking for a self-motivated, detail-oriented individual who loves digging into data, developing insights and communicating data-based recommendations. You will work closely with the internal teams and tech partners to implement your recommendations, track the impact and course correct.

The position will report to the Senior Management of StoryWeaver. The person needs to be an out-of-the box thinker and should be a strong believer and propagator of use of open technologies.

The individual will be responsible for the following:

• Work closely with internal product owners to understand the target audience and their motivations, generate the product enhancement, development ideas and requirements documents
• Perform steps required to create analysis-ready data sets.
• Perform regular data analysis to demystify, assess readership, content gap, trends and performances.
• Extracting valuable insights from our data and generating analysis that drives user retention and conversion.
• Build a visualization tool that allows internal users to interactively explore the data and insights.
• Respond to ad-hoc report and analysis requests from other teams as needed.
• Take all data driven features to fruition by working closely with the product development teams.
• Be the bridge in between organization and other data-for-good communities.

Required skills:

• Bachelors in Computer Science, Statistics, Market Research, Operational Research, or related quantitative discipline.
• Experience working with databases and dashboards
• Experience / Capability to draw insights from Data
• Experience working in data analytics. 
• Good technical background with some hands-on experience with Python/R, relational databases (PostgreSQL) to perform data analysis.
• Ability to interpret findings through data visualization and delivery of presentations to both internal and external stakeholders.
• Expertise with Google Analytics and common Data Visualization platforms like Tableau, Apache Superset, Google DataStudio etc.
• Strong analytical thought process, ability to extract data and transform it into valuable, actionable insights
• 1-3 years of experience in the industry

Nice to have but not mandatory

• Experience working with non-profits
• Experience with Machine Learning

Location: This is a full-time position based out of Bangalore.

Salary: Compensation will be commensurate with experience.

Interested candidates can email their resume to [email protected]

Be the first to comment.

---

The Retell, Remix and Rejoice Contest from Pratham Books is on! This year we changed things around a bit, and gave our community themes to weave some story magic around. You can read more about this here. 

We thought the story weavers who are taking part this year might like some advice from our seasoned editors at Pratham Books on what to keep in mind when writing books for our very youngest readers!  

Manisha Chaudhry, Head of Content, Pratham Books

• When you're writing a Pratham Books Level 1 book, stick to one idea.
• Avoid sub-plots.
• Try to stick  to one line per page
• Be descriptive! Use words that have sensory pleasure in them - soft, hard, thin, cold, hot, shiny etc. 
• Use words that are fun to say-gobble gobble, drip drop, pins and needles etc
• Use the child's eye view , if possible

Rajesh Khar, Senior Editor, Pratham Books

• Writing with some learning objective or a moral is a big No for any children's fiction.
• A story can be woven around an idea but the learning has to be embedded in the story itself in a subtle manner just like an subconscious outcome, not open and blunt.
• The story must not have any biases and prejudices and should also steer clear of the stereotyped characters, settings and nuances.

Rajesh also shared some of his favourite Level 1 and 2 books (click on the name to read them on StoryWeaver!)

• Pehalwaanji learns a slippery lesson
• Smart Sona series
• Shringeri Srinivas series
• The Aloo Maloo Kaloo series 
• Grandpa Fish & the Radio
• The Royal Toothache  

Sandhya Taksale, Senior Editor, Pratham Books

 

Madhuri Purandare's 'Aunt Jui's Baby' perfectly embodies what my colleague Rajesh is saying. The learning is embedded in the story in a subtle manner and the narration is also from the child's point of view.  

Here is Sandhya's pick of level 1 and 2 books! 

• Gulli's Box of Things
• Bhima the Donkey
• I Can Help and the The Growing Up bilingual series books by Mini Srinivasan
• Clean Cat and the other Animals Around Us - bilingual series books by Kanchan Banerjee 

Yamini Vijayan, Commissioning Editor, Pratham Books

Repetition and patterns work very well with early readers. "Will you be my friend?" "Are you my mother?" are examples.. 

It's important  for writers to expose themselves to as many picture books as possible. Reading is important!

Bijal Vachharajani, Editorial Consultant, Pratham Books

• Write and rewrite. Reflect.
• Share your words with other readers and writers
• Read your story out loud for rhythm and pace.
• Ask for feedback. Listen to feedback.
• Edit ruthlessly. And then edit some more. 
• Read many books, and then read some more. Read what you like, read what you don't.
• Become a fierce critic of yourself. 
• Remember when you are writing for children, you need to pull up your socks and give it your best. They will never settle for less. 

Be the first to comment.

---

 

Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani

Basha and Sainabi are in a panic. Ammi is ill, and Saira aunty has just announced that she is arriving for lunch - with 23 other people! Budding chef Basha thinks he can cook Ammi's Dum Biryani, but her recipe only makes enough for 4 people. Math wiz Sainabi jumps in to help, declaring that she knows how to turn a 4-person recipe to a 24-person recipe. Do the siblings succeed in serving up a truly Dum Dum-a-Dum biryani?

ACTIVITIES 

Ball Toss! 

Resources

 A ball

How to play

• Have the children stand around in a circle.

• Toss the ball to the next child, or any child if you want to make it mad.

• Say a food ingredient while tossing the ball (keep this open across languages, for eg: haldi will do).

• Every time the ball is tossed the child who catches it has to say the name of an ingredient.

• First child to repeat or blank is out.

Play till you get 3 winners.

Weave-A-Story

Resources

• Paper

• Pens

What to do

• Put up a picture or a first sentence as a writing prompt.

• Prompts: My pet kangaroo was hungry and all I had in the fridge was a pod of garlic….

• More Prompts: We, my sister and I, were making our first ‘all-by-ourselves’ cake for my mother’s birthday. What started out as a special day soon turned bizarre…to say the least…

• And more:  Remember the summer break when we managed to catch the ‘milk stealing thief’ of our colony.

• Divide the children into small groups and have them create the story from that prompt.

• Each child takes a turn writing one sentence to add to the story and passes it on to the next.

• Keep it going in the group until they have finished it (maybe helpful to have a length or a time limit so that the stories don’t go toooo out of control)

• When all the groups have finished, ask a volunteer to come up and read the story out!

This isn't a spoon! it's a...

Materials needed: A bunch of kitchen utensils (10): ladle/spoon, pressure cooker whistle, lid of a pan, fork, wooden spatula, lemon squeezer

What to do

• Divide the group into clusters of 5 kids each

• Hand over 2 utensils to each group.

• Give the teams 15 minutes of preparation time to devise a play and use the utensils as creative props; use them for creative purposes other than their regular use. Is it a ladle or a microphone?

• Other Teams and you act as judges and award points to each other.

Team with the highest points wins!

 

Be the first to comment.

---