Re: Prizes
I'm learning a third language with an App called Duolingo and it does exactly what you ask
Duolingo is actually a "gamified" "crowd-sourcing" machine-translation assistant. See "Gaining Wisdom from Crowds", CACM 55.3 (March 2012).
It was created by Carnegie Mellon's Luis von Ahn, who also created what became Google's photo-tagging game app, to get people to improve literal machine-generated translations by deciding what idiomatic translations are most plausible. So the language-learning aspect is already a secondary goal; the in-game rewards (like opening new tasks) are tertiary.
This sort of "gamification" has been a major area of discussion in academia, industry, and organizations like the US military for quite a while - nearly a decade, I'd say. (That CACM article includes references back to 2008.) I'm afraid there's nothing novel about suggesting it be applied to promote literacy.
Frankly, I think Tim's right about this one. It would be hard for a dedicated app to provide a better set of incentives than those already provided by basic communication and social media. And those have been hugely effective; multiple studies have shown that the latest generations of schoolchildren (in the US, from the Millennials on up) do far more writing than any previous generation.
The vast majority of that writing is casual, of course, whether it's texting or IMs or social-media updates or flame-warring in online forums; and middle-brow intellectuals love to complain about its quality. But it's still writing, and other studies suggest that when encouraged to write more substantial and formal prose, those casual-writing skills transfer. They're by no means the complete set of required skills for substantial, sophisticated, appealing prose, but they help.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
