Last week LeVar Burton launched a Kickstarter campaign to help make Reading Rainbow more accessible to more children by getting it onto the web and getting it into school classrooms for free.
Reading Rainbow was a television series that aired on PBS from 1983 to 2006. It was hosted by LeVar Burton and the theme of the show was centered around encouraging children to read, showing them that reading can be exciting and fun.
In 2012 Reading Rainbow was revived in the form of an interactive reading app for the iPad and Kindle Fire tablets. The app includes hundreds of fiction and non-fiction books, as well as video field trips, designed for kids ages 3-9.
But not everyone owns a Kindle Fire or iPad, and that’s a problem for LeVar Burton and the folks at Reading Rainbow because they want it to be more accessible by more children, not just those with tablets.
That’s why LeVar Burton decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding to help bring Reading Rainbow to more platforms, most notably the web.
The initial goal was set at $1 million, with one month to raise that amount. Expectations were far exceeded, however, when that million dollar mark was reached in just 11 hours.
Now with 28 days to go, donations have already climbed to over $3.4 million. And a new goal has been set at $5 million.
The initial goal of $1 million was to fund building a new version of the Reading Rainbow app for classrooms and teachers, and making Reading Rainbow accessible on the web.
The $5 million goal adds more platforms, including mobile phones, Android devices, and selected game consoles and set-top boxes. It also brings Reading Rainbow to more classrooms for free, up from 1500 classrooms to 7500.
Awesome! Who else remembers the show?
For those that need their memory refreshed: