Learnables

Revolutionising education for children aged 4-14 using an educational tablet with exclusive educational content that teaches skills such as well as coursework in a fun and interactive way.

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Inspiration

Origin Story

One fine day I was at one of my uncle's house who is a software engineer. He has two very young children ** aged 2 and 4 ** and both of them are really good at operating laptops, tablets and phones at a very young age. However, due to a lack of direction and the distractions on these devices nowadays through ads and unproductive content they weren't really making the most out of their devices. That's when I got the idea of learnables how about I channel their energies into something productive such as learning programming like their father, making animations on scratch or digital drawing.

Idea development

What first started as an ed tech platform quickly shifted into a tablet a hub for multiple and all ed tech platforms and learning I mean who wants another edtech platform right ? We decided that instead of just being another edtech platform which even may not be such effective why not build a product that fits this very in need market segment and construct a digital device just for education something that we haven't seen much before.

What it does

First let's discuss some selling points of the product and features that make it great.

A Hub for education

The main selling point of our product is the fact that it is a hub for education and learning. What do we mean by that ? Well the product ships with ebooks, educational games, courses from edtech agencies that we have partnered with, software such as scratch, vscode and others. It also features exclusive content from various edtech platforms. In the future we see it as evolving into a platform where edtech platforms can publish their apps and see better results, more users and growth as well as all making educational content.

Parents Love It !

As a parent one wants the best for their child do they not ? After conducting surveys from multiple surveys in our home country in Pakistan we have concluded that parents are very concerned about the social activity of their children and how it affects their mental and physical life. However, existing parental controls and boundless restrictions won't really work and make the child rebellious. Instead of that using a platform where they gain the love of learning and find a skill that they are passionate about is the sustainable way to prioritize your child's wellbeing as well as your relationship with them.

A Solid Deal

In addition one of our core selling points is our price. It's ridiculously cheap and affordable. With the selling price being around 50,000 PKR ($180) you get the best of both price and comfort. How are we able to lower the selling price this much without compromising quality ? The clever use of our own software operating system allows us to optimize really well for the hardware that we are using giving us an edge over competitors while also remaining affordable.

Truly Desktop Class

The learnable tablet is truly desktop class. Built on top of linux ubuntu and a top of the line raspberry pi, you can be sure it packs a punch. Without sounding like an advertisement, this means that on the tablet you will be able to run things that you won't be able to on a regular tablet and actually get to code, design and animate.

Now let's move on to the functionality of the tablet and a brief overview of what it has to offer from the software side.

Functionality

Now moving on the functionality of the product as we said before users can learn on the tablet using brilliant platforms such as khan academy, coursera, edkasa etc. Other than that the tablet features games which are educational and fun teaching skills such as coding, maths, science and astronomy. In addition, educational ebooks will also be available for free on the tablet. One of the main aspects of the product is content restriction and parental controls this means that the apps that one can download will be limited to educational ones and for content consumption there will be a parental controlled web browser and youtube for kids with selective channels only.

How we built it

The Circuit

The circuit consists of a raspberry pi connected to a 10,000 mAH amp battery attached to a usb c charging module. The battery output goes through a dc/dc step up convertor which converts voltage from 3.7V to 5V. Using gpio and display adapter pins the raspberry pi is connected to a 7 inch touch screen as well the battery, speaker and microphone.

Casing

The casing is 3d printed that we got made from a professional. Its a simple and box like design.

The Software

We use linux as the base specifically ubuntu so that we can take advantage of the development framework and tools that it offers. We could have used windows but it has too much overhead and is not optimised for mobile devices such as the raspberry pi. After installation of ubuntu we deleted all useless software as well the Desktop environment choosing to create our own. For the best design and operatiblity with a touch device we chose to use a combination of electron and react allowing us to create a beautiful desktop environment as well as touch intuitive.

Challenges we ran into

Touch optimization

One of the main problems was optimization for touch as ubuntu and linux systems are generally not built for touch devices and don't have great touch support. However the use of react and touch events as well as a custom on screen keyboard allowed us to greatly reduce this problem.

Custom Circuit

The circuit also caused us a lot of problems as we don't have someone in our team that is an electrical engineer or knows PCB Fabrication and schematic design but we managed to solve this hurdle through trial and error.

Creating a desktop environment from scratch

Surprisingly we found out that not many if none have ever created their own desktop environment for linux from scratch other than kde and gnome so it was really tough doing that but smart use of bash scripting and electron allowed us to overcome tribulation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of our software design, the optimizations that we made, the circuit and the aesthetics of the product. But what we are most proud of is the software a custom operating system that is on par with android, ios and other operating systems built in our own basement by seemingly inexperience people.

What we learned

We learnt alot about of web development, linux and low level C development in linux as well as circuit design and schematics. These are the hard skills but some of the soft skills that we aquired along the way were communication amongst the team, leadership, management and the art of not giving up because if you give up you loose out on something that you could have been and something you could have built.

What's next for Learnables

After developing the prototype we plan to build a website for pre-orders and in the meantime get investment from investors and start marketing and setting up the factory as well as the assembly line for mass production including shipping of the product. In part we have already done this by contacting hot-shot investors such as Moonis Rahman in pakistan who are excited about the project as well as the sparktank incubator.

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