Mathematics is a subject that kids either find very engaging, or downright boring. For the latter group, having to sit down and study the subject can be worse than going to the dentist – an ordeal that Mustafa Saeed can attest to.
“I had struggled in my early school education, not because I did not like it. Rather, it just could not engage me enough to keep me interested,” Saeed, who hails from Pakistan, recalls. There was an instance when his parents tried using a number of “tricks” to make him learn how to count. Instead, Saeed ended up learning how to do so by playing Nintendo’s hit game [series], Super Mario, when he had to “collect those coins from zero to 100, and repeat the process.”
This wasn’t the only instance where Saeed found his learning being accelerated through playing games. “Similarly, Farmville taught me that rice requires extra amount of water to grow, and Angry Birds taught me how physics works,” he adds.
These incidents came back to him when he was giving a seven-year-old kid math tuition during his junior year in university:
It seemed like an easy job, but the experience changed my perspective of learning and education. Keeping that child engaged and focused was an effort in itself. We as students have always experienced that the existing curriculum presentations are highly unattractive and lackluster, especially for young children.
To keep his attention, Saeed decided to gamify his lessons, and was surprised to find that it helped a lot in helping his student learn and understand the concepts at hand.
“During this time, I actually developed a lot of interest in how games and certain dynamics, when incorporated, can actually influence behaviors in learning,” he says. “Awards in the form of badges triggered a sense of competition and achievement in Hadi [his student], and as a result, better output.”
These experiences inspired Saeed to create 3Restart, a company focused on creating predictive and adaptive learning solutions in the form of games. According to him, the software behind the games “can measure and generate analytics to measure learning patterns and an improved learning experience,” while simultaneously utilizing game dynamics to make the learning content interesting and engaging.
He terms it as a “learning positioning system” that puts learning priorities on track, while keeping the content engaging and fun yet as natural as possible.
Saeed claims that the product can “successfully predict what a student is most likely to forget at a specific time, and works mainly on enhancing knowledge retention amongst kids […] it can predict what knowledge needs to be reviewed now in order to efficiently balance that particular knowledge group which is most required to be learnt.”
Skipping local, going global
Currently, the product is still in the pilot phase, and the team is testing features with students and teachers from local schools, making sure to pick testers from different backgrounds and income brackets. Their target, Saeed reveals, isn’t just to help students in Pakistan, but those from all over the world. Toward this end, they are launching it on the respective app stores to reach an international audience.
Aiming for the global market, though, means opening themselves up to competition from international competitors as well. Saeed says that they don’t have substantial competition within Pakistan, but beyond its borders they face companies such as Sweden’s Toca Boca and South Korea’s KnowRe. The latter recently raised US$6.8 million to accelerate its offerings in the US, Korea, and broader Asian markets.
“What makes us different is that all these games focus on what a child learns; we focus on what a child is most likely to forget, hence providing the intelligence to review what is required the most rather than random spaced repetition [a learning technique],” he says.
Second time’s a charm
3Restart isn’t Saeed’s first attempt to create a learning-based product. His first company aimed at creating a smart and interactive classroom environment that recognizes hand-drawn sketches and animates the surroundings according to the specific concept – an ambitious piece of technology to create. “It eventually failed due to my inexperience in understanding and running a business,” he admits.
This time, however, Saeed not only has this experience under his belt, but also the advice and guidance of local startup incubator Invest2Innovate (i2i), which specializes in accelerating early-stage entrepreneurs in developing markets.
“i2i helped me connect with the right mentors […] Learning from my past mistakes, combined with the mentorship and the network offered by the accelerator, gave 3Restart the perfect start,” he says. The team had graduated as Invest2Innovate’s second ever batch early last year.
So far, 3Restart has been able to run its operations completely bootstrapped, and are waiting for the right time to raise funds and present its product to the global market.
See: New report shines a light on Pakistan’s startup opportunities
This post Inspired by Super Mario and Farmville, this founder thinks games can help kids learn math appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Inspired by Super Mario and Farmville, this founder thinks games can help kids learn math
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