Education start-ups trigger tech revolution
The experiment to amalgamate technology with mainstream education has become dynamic by the day with more entrepreneurs establishing education start-ups to stimulate a technology revolution in the education sector. While 3-4 year-old education start-ups are still working on the scale of their impact, their efforts have added potential to the term “edupreneurs”. There are some unique education start-ups that are trying to bring about a change in the basic learning process at schools and at home.
Sabina Jain, co-founder of Callystro, a four-year old start-up, said, “Learning is an experience and should be enjoyed rather than being like a boring schedule which doesn’t excite a learner. Callystro aims to attract learners by introducing game-based learning. That is why we developed a software at Callystro called ‘Cobels’ which consists of 300 games on two subjects — Maths and EVS. These games are aligned with the curriculum, but do not follow the difficulty level class-wise. Instead, the gamebased learning at Callystro is measured in terms of a ‘learn- ing ladder’, which starts from the basics to higher levels. So far, Cobels has reached 100 schools and 50-55,000 learners.”
Another interesting innovation by Callystro is their “Financial Literacy” module that aims to impart basic knowledge of the financial world to 7th-10th class students as well as to women in rural and urban areas. Jain said: “Financial literacy is a need that has not received enough attention. Teaching children at a young age the most basic concepts about money will help them become more aware about how the economy operates from the grassroots level. Questions like what is money, why is money important, what is a bank and how banks across the world operate, knowledge about basic transactions at a bank, expenses and savings etc., must be answered. At present, we have developed 18 games and our modules have reached out to schools, banks and women empowerment groups alike.”
Another innovative education start-up that aims at improvising school education is “Chapter Apps Inc”. Rohit Kumar, founder, Chapter Apps Inc., said, “Chapter Apps is a full contact service solution company for corporate and educational institutions. The reason why ebooks have failed is that they did not add anything to consumer experience. The idea at Chapter Apps is to use audio and video to make subjects more interesting and appealing for the learner. Monotonous maths and chemistry formulae can become more interesting if explained with innovation.” Nitin Pandey, director, Parentune, said, “We have taken the usual drawing room discussions of parents about their children’s growths and challenges online where they can communicate with a large community of parents with similar queries. The advantage is that there is also a community of experts on various child-related issues where parents can ask direct questions through live chat. Other parents can benefit with the feedback of the expert’s advice that is being shared by the people themselves. Most common questions that parents ask when it comes to education of their children are related to how to improve handwriting, excessive spelling mistakes, overcoming maths phobia and how to improve concentration and make studying more interesting for their kids.”