Erandi Aprende

In Mexico we are experiencing the first effects of the fourth industrial revolution. Today, 40% of employers cannot find candidates with skills related to their applications, and 65% of jobs for future generations do not yet exist. Even if technology and science represent the future, in Mexico only 17% of people working in this area are women.

Therefore, we must take advantage of an inherent market niche for economic prosperity and community progress,  support and help strive one of the most vulnerable groups in the social pyramid, such as girls and women.

Erandi Aprende is an online e-learning platform that encompasses the ability to trigger girl's passion and involvement in STEM areas by providing resources  that promote quality and inspirational education. Our aim is to enssure that there are more women occupying leadership positions in science and technology,  winning more Nobel prizes or being able to design and own patents.

Worldwide there is 3.25 billion women who are less than 25 years old. Overall, less than 30% of these girls will engage in a STEM related subject even if the latter represent the careers of the future. 

In Mexico 25 million girls have the same age range and will hardly choose these fields due to academic deficiencies, lack of knowledge of the prospects available in the area, as well as enduring gender roles. Rural and peri-urban areas generally are the most affected by lack of resources and opportunities.

 Therefore, we should offer access and a first approach to the STEM areas to all girls and young women  to reduce the gender gap in the field and empower them to have a bright future.

Erandi Aprende is an online e-learning platform designed to provide STEM education programs, tools and resources to girls ages 8-12 and 13-18. Learning is guided by our avatar and AI Erandi, a young inventor with the ability to use technology to solve daily problems and understand that science is present in everything she does.

The core idea of Erandi Aprende revolves around three key aspects: education must be personalized, practical and inspirational in order to truly impact girls.

Personalization is achieved with tailored content depending on girls’ needs and preferred learning method, this can be through videos, infographics, stories or games. We also personalize the learning experience by proposing content that links STEM with their hobbies.  

Erandi Aprende offers first approach to the STEM areas. We invite girls to turn their home into a hackerspace or an invention workshop space in order to achieve the practical aspect.  

Furthermore, we believe that the future of learning does not rely in absorbing a handful of information, but in transforming it to knowledge and develop a passion to create and invent things. Erandi Aprende is also a digital space where creativity and vocation can be discovered. 

Our target population are girls ages 8-12 and 13-18 in order to increase their participation in this area. We are aiming to reach both urban and rural areas to empower more women nationwide. 

We want to impact the lives of girls who might never heard that they can occupy leadership positions in science and technology,  be able to design and own patents, and why not, win Nobel prizes.

Through a series of surveys and interviews, we noticed that the main reason behind women's lack of participation consist of systemic gender biases which makes girls not choose to study science and technology careers. Besides, many potential clients stated that most material available online was still very abstract and they did not see any added value in being part of the STEM world.  

By being able to build connections among science and technology subjects, their hobbies and everyday activities, we can help them develop a passion for STEM and help them clarify the doubts they might have from class. Furthermore, by allowing them to see all the future perspectives they have by pursuing these careers, we might be able to trigger a higher participation in these fields.   

Our problem, solution and target population align with the challenge since our educational platform allows girls from all backgrounds to gain access to STEM education at a reduced cost, while fostering their passion or interest in the field, by using different learning methodologies and by interviewing everyday activities with science and technology. Likewise, our platform will provide girls with vocational orientation information to help them explore opportunities in the STEM realm and thus, invite them to join the field and bridge the gender gap.

Erandi Aprende is a creative and personalized e-learning platform (guided by our avatar Erandi) for STEM subjects that allows girls aged 8-12 and 13-18 to transform any place into a classroom, a hackerspace or an invention workshop. 

We have noticed that our clients today face systemic gender biases which makes girls not choose science and technology careers. Besides, adequate STEM material is not available in Spanish. Furthermore, most programs that implement this type of learning in their schools or homes are expensive and fail to trigger passion for science and technology. Ultimately, they simply end up becoming another school assignment that needs to be completed in order to have a passing grade. In contrast, Erandi Aprende is a digital space where creativity and vocation can be discovered. 

This is an opportunity to help a minority and a vulnerable group such as women and thus transform education in the process. Our platform will allow empower women and make quality and tailored learning a reality by adapting to the hobbies, abilities and aspirations of each user alongside allowing them to move at their own pace.

Erandi Aprende is a Progressive Web Application that can be accessed from any device, it uses React for front end and python for backend.

Our platform uses simple artificial intelligence algorithms to recomend users STEM content and activities based on their specific characteristics, as well as natural laguage processing to identify users needs. 

Erandi uses stored data from users in order to personalize their learning experience.

Using artificial intelligence algorithms to deliver personalized content to users is a widely used and tested technology nowadays. Besides, their use in education are becoming more and more common due to the impact achieved  by automatizing research based methodologies in order to boost knowledge acquisition and empower students.

Technology can help women's empowerment initiatives by offering alternatives to logistic and budget challenges of in-person programs.

One example is german website CyberMentor and its online STEM mentoring program for girls.  A study1 on the effects of this program showed that e-mentoring  programs have a big potential to help students and possible good long term effects. 

1 Stoeger, H., Duan, X., Schirner, S., Greindl, T., & Ziegler, A. (2013).   The effectiveness of a one-year online mentoring program for girls in STEM. Computers & Education, 69, 408-418.

https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/ef...

Our online e-learning platform, Erandi Aprende, encompasses the ability to trigger girl's passion and involvement in STEM areas. Erandi Aprende provides resources and programs that promote quality and inspirational education.

Our goals are to make science and technology accessible to all young girls and make them aware that these subjects are not just present everywhere but represent the future of work. By using our platform girls gain confidence in STEM related subjects and are able to perceive themselves as actors of change.

This is linked to our long-term vision: empower girls to become the next generation of women in STEM while tackling systemic gender roles which remain the main obstacle towards bridging the gender gap in these fields.

In the end, women represent almost half of the world's population and economy and seeing a higher participation rate in STEM areas would involve greater benefits for everyone.

To test these assumptions, we have presented our platform to girls ages 8 to 18. Our results show that even girls who formerly thought that STEM fields were not for them changed their attitude towards these subjects and felt motivated to learn more about them.

Currenlty we are serving 200 girls which have been actively involved with us while testing our first prototypes. We reached them by contacting our own families and friends, as well as reaching out our former schools and by getting in touch with a couple of STEM teachers. Once our platform is offically launched in August it will serve somewhere 1000 girls and young women. We aim to reach 100 thousand users in the next year, and around 1 million in the next five years. 

We know that once we reach the 1 million users mark we can start expanding to other markets in Latin America and others regions such as South and Southeast Asia, Middle East, Sub-saharan Africa and North America. This would be ensurred by traslating our content into other languages such as English, French, Portuguese and Arabic. 

By doing this we would make sure that more girls worldwide can use our service and fastforward our mission to birdge the gender gap in said areas. Currently one of our team members who is a translator is working on making our content available both in English and Spanish. In the following stage we would hire other experts in the field to ensure that the use of language also adapts to the cultural realities of the different areas of the world. 

Since we are a at an early and prototype stage, financial hurdles remain our main concern. Being semifinalists in the Youth Challenge, we recieved 1000 USD as capital seed to do our first dummy. Yet, so far we have no financial  flux and we are about to begin our first sells with the use of fintech.

Besides, in order to become a legal entity we will have to register as a small enterprise. Yet, due to the current pandemic, we are unable to go to the corresponding authorities and start processing paperwork to gain a legal status.

Furthermore, we still need to consult with an IA expert how smooth our technology works in order to avoid any technical difficulties once our platform is launched.

In the next five years we need to enssure financial stability in order to avoid having to focus our energy towards fundraising instead of content or AI development.  

In order to overcome financial barriers we need to secure funds via one MIT solve grant besides getting a couple of angel investors. That way we will ensure having enough capital to continue with our mission and be able to reach profitability in the next five years.

Likewise, our partnerships will allow us to expand our product suite, reduce operation costs, reach more potential users and gain further insights while taking advantage of each one's diversity and strenghths.

In the legal realm we only need to be patient in order to be able to gain legal status. 

Regarding all technical support, perhaps we can start providing college students or recent  graduates internship experiences in order to have specialists working with us, while gaining work experience. 

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We are four full-time staff.

We are Youth Challenge (UNICEF and UNDP international contest) semifinalists and a transdisciplinary team united by a 10 year old friendship. Two of our team members are STEMers: Carmen is a environmental biologist and Miroslava is a mechatrononics and computer engineer. Both of them have provided us with insights of what is like to work in the field, and what challenges they have come accross. Me (Andrea) being a political scientist can have a better understanding on how to approach the problem from a social perspective. Sophie who is a translator and voice actor helps us with translating our content in other languages by dubbing or adding subtitles to our courses. 

Furthermore, Sophie, Carmen and Miroslava are very creative people which has pushed the team towards drawing the link between STEM subjects, everyday life and other areas suchas social sciences, humanities and arts. 

Currently we are working with Socialab Mexico who is providing us with mentorship on how to establish our venture.

Also, Vocation Central is helping us with creating a section of the platform only dedicated to help girls learn about STEM careers and what can their prospects be if they decide to work in the field.

Moreover, along with the female lead coding club from UC Berkeley, called Girls Who Code Berkeley we are creating a course where we teach little girls basic coding concepts to produce a ballet choreography.

Likewise, we are working with STEM for kids Mexico. We are developing a set of eight STEM activities in which both groups can share their knowledge and experience in order to generate more educational content. 

We live in a world that is constantly reinventing itself and we can not apply the same teaching methods as a hundred years ago. Learning to program, solve problems and understand the world around us have become essential skills and a source of empowerment. Besides, the crisis that we are currently facing made us realize the increasing need for providing quality education even when students are away from a classroom. We believe that the future of learning relies in developing passion for solving problems, create and invent things.

For this reason, we provide girls via a freemium to premium model the necessary skills and tools to succeed in the future with all the educational material (vocational orientation tests and information, invention workshop space, videos, infographics, games and stories) that will be available in our online platform. We allow all users to gain access to certain games, courses, stories, basic orientation information, contests and have a basic experience of their on workshop where they can collect memories from their projects and progress. On the other hand, the premium version will let the user have 1 on 1 meetings with mentors, access all content, have an upgraded version from their workshop, content for university exam preparation, as well as acces to premium users events and discounts.

STEM subjects will employ the highest amount of people in the next thirty years and hence we need to prepare girls to be ready to enter the workforce and thus, empower them to transform their world. 

Erandi Aprende will continiue the freemium to premium model since this methodology can be easily replicated and scaled. Besides, we will combine other business model elements such as adds and publicity in pur platform pr alliances material exchange and collaborations.

Since our platform is at an early and prototype stage, financial hurdles and exploiting technology's potential remain our main concern. We believe that we would benefit from all the help provided by the Solve network to be able to build, grow and continue developing our business in order to reach more girls, help them turn into remarcable STEMers and become a reference in the STEM e-learning domain. 

Due to the ongoing pandemic, now more than ever e-learning platforms need to provide children and youth with the tools and skills they will need to excell in the future. Since we are a at an early and prototype stage, financial hurdles and building the right network of mentors and partners remain our main concern. We need some tutoring from experts in the education, science, technology, recruiting, monitoring, marketing and business field, in order to build a self suficient and sustainable business while being able to develop content that is useful for our users.

Some organization which we would like to partner with would be the UNDP, UNICEF, UNESCO, Google, LEGO education, the MIT,MIT Media Lab, Solve, Microsoft, and IBM  since they can provide us valuable insights into how to improve our platform besides, being tutored by them, gain access to a vast network or potential allies, learn best practices,develop more content that is in the line with the user's needs and give each other mutual exposure.

We believe that we are qualified for this prize since our solution is for girls and is being developed by girls. Our educational e-learning platform offers access and a first approach to the STEM areas to girls and young women helping to reduce the gender gap and empowers them to build a better world.

In case we recieve this prize we would use it to hire certain pedagogues, professors ans scientists to create more content which is adecuate to the user's needs; as well as coders and engineers to ensure that different experts in the field are able to provide us with imput and further discuss scaling ideas.

Part of our solution is to attain girls living in rural or peri-urban areas which generally are the most affected by lack of resources and opportunities. Since now at days most people have a smart phone, users can easily use our service via their mobile device. Our educational e-learning platform offers access and a first approach to the STEM areas to girls and young women helping to reduce the gender gap and empowers them to build a better world.  

In case we recieve this prize we would invest it in order to develop other type of content for our costumers living in said areas such as exclusive workshops, events, conferences or helping them join women in STEM networks.

We are aware that AI and machine learning will enable us to reach out more potential users and have an impact on a larger scale, since we would be delivering personalized education to girls both from rural backgrounds with no access to STEM education and girls living in a city who own electronic devices.

We are qualified because for the past six months we have been studying its current applications and scope in education. Also, we have already defined the processes we want to improve with the help of various of trials with potential users.

As mentioned before, the core idea of Erandi Aprende revolves around three key aspects: education must be personalized, practical and inspirational in order to truly impact girls so they decide to choose STEM areas. We are in the early stage of training an AI with this formula.  We envision Erandi to become the educational assistant of the future, capable to boost knowledge and provide not just a tailored curriculum but to teach users how math, science and technology can be found in their hobbies and help them build the links between different disciplines. We want to make this a reality for all girls in order to overcome education defiance in STEM subjects.

In case we receive this prize, we are going to be able to accelerate the development of the artificial intelligence of our project by hiring experienced AI researchers, data scientist and cognitive and behavioral experts.