KidsToLearn

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Why

We are now traversing a hard chapter of mankind's story. 40.000 years ago some Neanderthal has started a long journey that has projected the mankind on the skies, on the moon, in building extra-large cities, in making computers and in doing many other, not always good, extraordinary things. How we did it?

Every achievement has required generations to be collected. We, as mankind, have spent thousands of years in building better houses for us and relatives, in understanding how to manage the fire, creating a wheel, and so on. Every forward step we have done as species was not inspired by an individual but has come from the generations of individuals that have projected the whole human species ahead. How was it possible?

We, as a species, have always had the care of our children. Our children will overcome the virus and they will understand how to avoid in the future a situation similar to the actual one. So, we firmly believe that in one of the darkest moments the humankind has ever seen, we have to take care of our most important thing, our children: KidsToLearn is a simple tool to help them in learning and smiling. The science could defeat the Covid19 in the next months, our children's future studies may defeat all the CoronaViruses forever.

Inspiration

We all can sympathize with the difficulties concerning digital learning during this COVID Pandemia. A lot of us have kids (especially little pupils) and struggle every day to accomplish all their educational tasks. It's absolutely not easy to attend all the lessons, remember the rolling schedule of the digital meeting, homework to send, corrupted invitation links, difficulties intake speech during the lessons, low attention... everything happen while the parents are cooking, cleaning the house, traveling around groceries, work (physical or smart working), fighting the boredom for yourself and your dear ones. All those problems are even bigger if your child is 6-7yo, as digital e-learning platforms were born in an Age without the Covid-19 and built as a support for "older" children (14yo and above). So, one day, we thought "Hey, what if we create an App to support all those challenges?". And so we did! This is our aim: supporting parents and pupils in using e-learning platforms in a more feasible and intuitive way. And that was the start of KidsToLearn. A new star is born.

What it does

It's aimed to help students, teachers, and families through specific tools and functionalities:

• RAISE YOUR HAND BUTTON: Students can push a big red button to start asking and speaking, and so they will be able to recall the teacher's attention directly on her smartphone during the e-learning session.
  • LESSONS' CALENDAR: Teachers can create an online calendar for their classes and send an alert notification to their students as a memorandum or if a student isn't online during the scheduled lesson.
    
  • EMOTICONS& STICKERS: Teachers can send positive or negative emoticons&stickers to their students in real-time to positive or negative underline their behavior during the lesson and claim their attention.
  • URL SHORTENER: To help students and parents to access the lesson, the teacher can send a direct, simple and extremely short link, with a minimal length of simple and mnemonic words, to make the lesson's access easier.
  • GAMING: Self-assessment and evaluation Peer-to-peer gaming and rewarded in class-shared Leaderboards. The teacher can decide to launch the game at any time, eg to start the competitions at the beginning of the lesson to test the profit of their students in the homework phase or, for instance at the closing of the lesson to test their students' level of attention during the lesson itself. The game is enriched with a competitive leaderboard and virtual trophies that gain the students will in doing better.

How we built it

We have built it with passion, Using cutting edge technologies like Flutter for the application part and Firebase for the BackEnd we have built a solid application very fast and ready to scale in the production phase.

Challenges we ran into

We have used our time in discussing ideas, collecting the information, and forming the team. We have scheduled all the activities in an efficient way. During the Hackaton the time-management, the information dissemination among the team members and the collection of the ideas it's the really difficult part of the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The KidsToLearn idea perfectly addresses the OECD ongoing challenges related to the education sector during Covid19 pandemic.
• Remote working with an extraordinary EU team.
• Have released a MVP in just 2 days
• Have participated in a such important competition
• No matter how difficult the times are, we have confirmed that children come first; they have got all our dedication in developing our proposed idea

Challenges we have encountered

Working in a short time and efficiently forced us to high consumption of data and the wifi network. Furthermore, the timing for the production of quality content, codes, and links requires time and deadlines, being short-term, have led to a slight moment of defiance. Accomplishments that we're proud of The KidsToLearn idea perfectly addresses the ongoing OECD challenges related to the education sector during the Covid pandemic19. In a small time, we worked remotely with an EU team that was fantastic and gave us the opportunity to get to know new talents and new ways of facing challenges.

What we learned

Mixing ideas from many professionals and creating cooperation between different people, with different professions and skills, is important for having a global vision of situations. The use of new tools, new partners, meant that new ideas were born!

What's next

The app will be released on GitLab in open source. It will also be distributed on the GooglePlay and AppleStore marketplace, for children, teachers, and classrooms who want to adopt it. It may be helpful to have some marketing visibility to make people aware of the use of the app. We would like to add other features, as teachers or students will certainly ask for them. We expect to reach the goal within a few weeks. Another thing that we would like to introduce is a mechanism that allows parents to put "some money" on the class page to create Amazon-Gift-Card as a gift for their children when they climb the rankings.

Business Plan

The App has no specific maintenance costs. In order to stay alive, the App has just to cover the Cloud costs, that in any case are really cheap. If the adoption rate of the App will become consistent, we can retain a fraction on the parent’s prizes or we can decide to put some ads on the website. Anyway, we have done this to push people in “doing something” to challenge the Virus and the current situation and not to raise money. The business model is self-sustainable, a characteristic that has a great value for an emerging App or Service.

Thank you for your attention and your support.

The ASC27 Team

Proud to have been here

Built With

• firebase
• flutter