Rap Research Lab Presents: Mapper’s Delight

Hello good folks!

We’re proud to announce that our debut iOS app Mapper’s Delight is a part of the Verizon Innovative Learning HQ—a free online portal to help educators inspire curiosity in the classroom and beyond. Mapper’s Delight is a music and geography themed app that uses sight, sound and touch to let students interactively learn about rap’s range and diversity. 

Through our partnership with Verizon Innovative Learning HQ, we are putting hip-hop at the intersection of education and technology. The pandemic abruptly changed the way we learned and highlighted the fact that millions of under-resourced students in the U.S. lacked the connectivity, technology, and skills required for success in today's digital economy. Mapper’s Delight AR bridges the gap by providing an immersive experience for both educators and students that supports self-directed learning and also functions as a supplemental resource for Language Arts, Social Studies, Digital Humanities, Mathematics, Technological Literacy, and Digital Citizenship programs.

Whether through phone or tablet, students can explore the world around them utilizing rap lyrics. Mapper's Delight is our augmented reality (AR) application—built on top of our online archive of approximately 1 million hip-hop songs from 1979 to the present. In addition to lyric content and standard metadata (artist name, song title, release date, record label, etc.) songs have been analyzed for georeferences, entity recognition, sentiment, semantic relationships, and rhyme complexity. 

We are excited about Mapper’s Delight and can’t wait to see how educators utilize the app to expand student curiosity and interest in STEM. Educators can begin their journey by visiting Verizon.com/learning to learn more and register for the free online portal.

Tahir