A Daily Pursuit

It is mid-morning at O Kafés! CoffeeHouse in the Pepper Place complex in Lakeview. Julian and Shaundra Daily, their baby in a stroller tableside, are taking turns describing the wonders of the young mind.

It is a topic they know something about. The Dailys have staked their careers, the fortunes of their young family, and their new home in Birmingham on undertaking creative, groundbreaking work discovering exciting new ways for kids to learn.
The Daily’s company is named G8Four (The name comes from an abbreviation of the biblical reference to Genesis 8:4—from the story of Noah when the ark rested on Mount Ararat.) The company designs ways to educate students, utilizing technology and media to open new avenues to learning.

Witness the Change Lab. This program brings kids together, helping them learn to collaborate and teaching them to ask questions. In a program this summer, the Dailys asked their students to envision a business that would help Birmingham, come up with business plan, and then express it. “Technology is always a part of what we do, because it is a part of everybody’s future,” says Julian. In Change Lab: Finance, students, age 6 to 15, came up with business ideas, told the story of their businesses, including creative ways to advertise and market. They were asked to express all of this in Scratch, a programming language being developed at Media Lab at MIT.

“The software allows students to use technology for innovation, learning how to manipulate media and programming techniques to create the effects they want,” says Shaundra.

“ChangeLab is an entrepreneurial effort, we love doing it and think it is really important work,” she says. A grant from the Department of Education allows G8Four to work with teachers to help them develop an inquiry-based science curriculum in the classroom (Students ask and answer questions the way scientists do). The Dailys are developing a web-based tool to help teachers develop those lesson preparation skills.

The couple works together systematically, with Julian handling the business functions such as marketing and Shaundra working on the technical and scientific side of the company’s efforts.

Julian was born in Cleveland in 1978 and lived in various cities in the Midwest, but his father’s family was from Alabama, Marion Junction just west of Selma, and Julian regularly came home on family trips.

He and Shaundra met while both were students at Florida State in 1999. After graduation Julian worked for Gallo Wines, in medical distribution, and finally for the office of the dean of graduate education at MIT, recruiting high-value candidates to the graduate school at the famous Massachusetts university.

Shaundra was born in Nashville and moved to Birmingham, where she graduated from John Carroll in 1997. She studied electrical engineering at Florida State, received a masters degree at Florida A&M, and then went to MIT, where she was awarded a second masters in media arts and sciences. She worked in affective computing, studying the ways that we use technology to sense emotion and how to use that technology in working with autism and emotional self-awareness.

Shaundra says: “The Media Lab at MIT is interesting because it is a lab and self-contained program, design focused but still technical. Even when I was in high school I was doing tutoring. I enjoyed teaching so much, but I always assumed any teaching I could do would always be on the side. I did not realize you could integrate the technical side of me with the passion of teaching kids. I found the chance to meld those two together in the work I did in the Future Learning Group at MIT.” Shaundra finished her masters at MIT in 2005 and plans on completing her PhD at the school in December.
The opportunity for the Dailys to move to Birmingham came with the One Laptop per Child Program, which Julian was working with while in Massachusetts. “For me coming to Birmingham felt like coming home because my family was rooted here in Alabama,” Julian says. The Dailys came to the city to work with teachers and the community in the One Laptop per Child Program. “The laptop project was a passion project for us. We spent three months in Birmingham working with the community. We decided after that summer to stay in Birmingham. We believe we can do some amazing things here,” Julian says.

Today G8Four is working with a Small Business Innovation Research Grant from the federal government to implement the use of computers across the educational curriculum. The company has two additional employees: Alia Carter, assistant director of creative learning, and New York-based Elana Langer, director of media based learning. In addition to the grant work, the company offers tutoring and test preparation services.•