GESAL (Give Every Student A Laboratory)

The constant decline of quality education in Africa has affected the morale of teachers and students. The interest of females in STEM is constantly degrading and it has been forecasted that globally, 65% of jobs by 2025 would require STEM knowledge (Weforum).

This decline is a result of unavailability of instructional materials in classrooms and laboratories, we are currently facing a low-to-no instructional material enabled classroom. Subjects that involves real-life practical demonstration are taught theoretically. GESAL is a low cost alternative for training students in STEM, it is designed specifically to accommodate low income earning schools that cannot afford STEM-instructional-materials. GESAL intends to be a backbone to at least 80% of these schools in West Africa within the next five years making at least 80% of students they produce to fit into the jobs coming up in 5 years.

Currently in West Africa, 90% of high schools fall into the low and middle income schools with a yearly turnover of over 2.4 million students, statistics shows that there is a declining trend in students’ performance across STEM subjects, apparently, these schools cannot purchase materials needed to train students in STEM fields. This would mean that in the next 5 years, almost 90% of students produced by these schools will not fall into the upcoming jobs

Majority of these schools (private schools) make an annual revenue within the range of $15,000 - $30,000 with over 80% of the funds being spent to offset salaries while less than 3% is spent on school development with little or no fund left to purchase proper infrastructures e.g STEM-infrastructures such as laboratories, engineering workshops and the likes which are necessary to teach effectively.

Studies indicate that up to 80% of us use our sight as primary learning style. Unfortunately, a lot of information in classrooms activities and workshops are delivered in a lecture format. If STEM is not properly taught, it might leads to frustration because of the abstract and complex nature of Sciences. Instructional materials enhances learning, making abstract concepts simple and relatable.

GESAL is a digital tool leveraged by students, teachers and schools to solve practical inaccessibility in teaching and learning STEM subjects.

GESAL, an offline mobile application that make STEM easier to understand by immersing students in real-life interactive and experiential learning experience. Students and teachers access our mobile application by navigating through their desired subject/topic of interest, we simulate each teaching and learning instructional resources required to complement learning modules in an interactive way for students to meet their performance objectives.

GESAL is an assembly of interactive STEM instructional resources in a digital format using augmented reality technology. Contents are currently designed after the West African Curriculum with a vision to scale across other curriculum and many languages

 These are the categories of people our product will potentially affect

Students in STEM: GESAL is equipped with analytic tool to measure the number of times students make use of our e-learning app which has been proven to increase retention rates of students by 75% because of its reoccurring use. Our solution will help reduce failure rates of students with more focus on female k12 students, while increasing their motivation to learn.

Teachers in STEM: Our primary research indicated that a lot of teachers struggle to teach some topics because of the inadequate resources present in schools, as at now, GESAL is used as a teaching aid during lectures

Schools: Our product is serving low and middle-income schools by providing digital infrastructures to teach students across the STEM fields. 22 new trade subjects were introduced to the Nigerian curriculum in which only four of these subjects were taught in schools because they were theory-based. Now, GESAL give schools variants of practical based subjects’ options to choose and make accessible to students

GESAL operational model is designed to acquire monthly feedbacks from students, teachers and schools on how the product is utilized and how it can be better

The number of girls enrolling in higher education is increasing rapidly in Nigeria, men outnumber women in STEM disciplines (UNESCO, 2010). The major cause is sciences have been factored to be a complex field, thus, reducing female interest in STEM, if women have a good foundation in these course, they would be encouraged in pursuing sciences. But considering the fact that schools do not have enough equipment to support this amazing growth of female interest in education, GESAL is providing a digital-platform to encourage girl participation in STEM, which gives females the better chance of keying into the upcoming jobs. 

Currently, schools that cannot afford laboratory teaches their students STEM using theoretically explanation, pictorial explanation and video explanation, with all these students can never get a realistic feel of the instructional materials that are required to complement performance objectives and learning goals.

GESAL takes a step ahead of video contents by bringing the object into a near realistic view so that students can interact and see the 3-dimension of the products rather than the regular 2 dimension that have been used previously. Solutions currently used in schools are watching online videos from youtube or any other e-learning platforms and also delivering lectures from the textbooks. GESAL’s competitive edge is that it’s a  product that provide engagement in real life experiential learning, customization GESAL provides content that is a nearest alternative to physical object.

Our product works offline cutting out the barriers of poor and no internet access, it’s also embedded with language customization which can be scaled across multiple cultural users

The core technology being used to develop our product is augmented reality technology also known as extended reality, which is an extension between reality and a 2-dimension view of an image.

 Augmented reality is a technology that brings in a view of the physical real-world environment into a computer-generated images, thus, changing the perception of reality. 

Visual content are often represented in pictures or videos apparently. augmented reality technology is an extension between reality and a 2d picture creating a 3d view of the image so that people can interact with it in a near realistic view in digital content. 

AR technology is a technology that exist between video and reality whereby students can interact with digital content, it has been able to clone realistic content into a digital content while retaining its primary use

With the deployment of AR technology, learning could be more fun, yet informative, making hard concept simple with real life applications

https://www.academia.edu/38171973/AR-SIS_AUGMENTED_REALITY_APPLICATION_TO_ENCOURAGE_STEM_TEACHING_AND_LEARNING

Africa’s current population is expected to double by year 2050 (https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/03/26/africas-population-will-double-by-2050), this means that there would be a steady growth in the population especially for youths under 25 as Africa remain the world largest under 25 population, this implies that there would be a lot of pressure on the available resources needed to teach, therefore, schools will have no choice but to rely on digital materials to meet their learning goals.

 Apparently,  https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL.FE.ZS, this data showed that women’s population is increasing rapidly in Africa, as 90% of the African countries have a larger women population. During the world economic forum last year, it was projected that 65% of jobs would be directly related to STEM, In Nigeria for example there is under representation of women in the STEM disciplines (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237382747_Female_Participation_in_Science_Technology_and_Mathematics_STM_Education_in_Nigeria_and_National_Development) . 

As women keep enrolling in the university, there is few distribution of the female gender across STEM discipline. Currently in West Africa, 90% of schools produce a turnover rate of 4 million students per year, this would mean that 90% of them would fit into the upcoming job opportunity worldwide creating more employed female youths. With GESAL, within the next 5 years we aim to set as a backbone to at least 70% of these schools so that female students produced would have the ability to compete with the job availability in the next 5 years.

Our product GESAL is currently being piloted across 30 schools reaching 2,000 students in Lagos, categories of schools piloted are public (government-owned schools) and private schools (low and middle income schools), with female students taking up 51% of the total enrollment in schools.

 GESAL is being utilized by giving students and schools access to digital instructional learning resources that help aid learning in STEM subjects. In a year time, we will be serving and impacting 150,000 students and 360 schools across states in Nigeria which cut across the low-income and middle-income schools.

 In five years, our goal is to scale across schools in the Anglophone part of West Africa, they include Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Liberia with a turnover rate of 3 million students and 4,000 schools yearly

To reach our 1 year goal of impacting 500,000 students and 1000 schools in Nigeria, our strategic plan  is to partner with the body that regulate senior secondary school curriculum in West Africa known as the WAEC (West African Examination Council). 

This would enable us train students participating in the WASSCE (West African Senior School Certificate Examination) with GESAL contents, WASSCE is a compulsory examination recognized locally and internationally, GESAL is being designed after the WAEC curriculum, we believe this would be a great level of impact especially with the declining grades in STEM subjects. More so, we intend to create 30% of the STEM curriculum within the first year.

In the next 10 years, Africa will be home to more than a quarter of the worlds’ population of under 25 years! Our five year goal is to prepare the females for the upcoming jobs in STEM discipline, in which 15% of the world’s working population will reside in Africa. Our five year goal is to impact 3 million students and 4000 students with females taking 51% of the population, how? By partnering with local and international organization with the interest of deploying educational contents that would make impact across communities.

 Also, we would have completely digitize STEM contents by hiring more skilled talents to help with the faster development of our contents

There are three major barriers that might serve as a hindrance to us in accomplishing our 1 year and five year goals. They cut across the technical, market and financial barrier

The technical barrier within the next one year is the shortage of skills and talents to help with the development of our contents. Immersive technology is one of the emerging technologies in which we still have a shortage of these talents locally and internationally, in other to meet our 1 year goal of creating 30% of the STEM curriculum and digitizing the entire STEM curriculum within the next 5 years, this barrier must be overcome. 

Others include raising financial investments to scale our product which covers the operational costs and marketing costs to cut across strategic implementation of products within Nigeria and West Africa at large. 

One big challenge with market penetration is the result of the current global pandemic as all schools are being forced to shut down, as a result, academic activities in low and middle income schools have been put on hold in other to protect student lives from the pandemic. Others are smartphone compatibility for augmented reality technology, because low end phones has the largest market share across local communities today.

In other to overcome the shortage in skills barriers, we are currently in partnership with the biggest organization for augmented and virtual reality technology in Nigeria, this would help us recruit talents that would assist with the development of our product, we have previously created awareness on the potential usage of immersive technology to solve local and global problems as we encourage a lot of youths to take up the skills of building augmented/virtual reality technology. 

We will leverage on the technology community and network of MIT to partner with a smartphone company that would help deploy GESAL content in a customized tablet and distribute across low income schools in the rural areas since they are the ones with the major challenge of smartphone compatibility.

 Our product is currently being bootstrapped by the $10,000 funds raised from the Facebook accelerator program, this is helping us build our content to some certain level, the $10,000+ grants that we will receive from MIT will help us to meet our impact goals within the next two years, as our current fund would help us meet our first year goal.

 One of the strategic move we made during this pandemic was pivoting our business model to a business 2 consumer, as students are home, we would be launching our students model on play store so that they can learn while they are indoors.

At GESAL, we have 10 employees working on the GESAL contents. They are comprised of 4 full-time staffs, 4 part-time staffs and 2 contract staffs

• Yewande Akinjewe is an augmented/virtual reality consultant and also the present founder of GESAL, she pioneered and promoted the use of augmented reality for education in Nigeria as a means to access STEM infrastructures, she has over four year experience building and leveraging AR/VR technology to help drive sales and improve consumer experience for enterprise. She specialize in identifying problems and creating solutions that could be solved with spatial computing. She has previously worked across multiple industries including education, law, media and marketing. She enjoys indulging in leadership activities and has volunteered across several local and international organization including the Commonwealth, Enactus, Hultprize e.t.c 

• Isiaq gbadamosi is an AR/VR developer with a passion for educational software development. he has over 3 years experience developing products across educational sectors and other industries,he is a nanotech udacity holder with a degree in Virtual reality development.

• Onyinye Onyakaba is a  UI/UX and experience Designer . Skilled in experience design for augmented reality application with .a  good knowledge of HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Strong education professional with a BSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Lagos, Akoka. She volunteers across various non-governmental organisation as she has special interest for teaching children in the rural environment 

Our current partnerships are 

• All Nigeria Conference of Principals of Secondary Schools (ANCOPPS): As the frontiers of education in Nigeria, we work with this group to strengthen the value of our content and through this association, they serve as a distribution channel to distribute our products across schools in Nigeria.

• Facebook Start accelerator: As one of the beneficiary of the facebook startup accelerator (2019), we are provided with Facebook resources, industry experts, regular training and mentor ship to build a valuable product 

• National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) is a public service institution as the ICT policy implementing arm of the Federal minister of communication of the Federal Republic of Nigera .It has sole responsibility of developing programs that caters for the running of ICT related activities in the country. As a governmnent mediator, GESAL is being deployed and piloted across government-owned schools

• Co-Creation HUB: An innovation centre dedicated to accelerating the application of social capital and technology for economic prosperity. Through their network within the Nigeria market, we have been able to reach out to a lot of potential clients and partners

• Junior engineers technicians and scientists: They are the largest groups of STEM students, we partner with them by training students with GESAL contents during their monthly programs across various JETS registered centres.

Freemium: To attract and display the value of our content as compared to the traditional methods, we give out some portion of our content (across each STEM Subjects)  for free.

Premium: We provide a Pay As You Need model which gives schools and students the ability to pay for specific topic or modules they wish to learn. Purchased modules are unlocked and used offline for as long as its needed.

We plan on sustaining our business through a combination of sales, grant and later investment

We plan on leveraging grant for a start as our aim is to make our service available for low income earner, this mean we need to scale to some certain extent in order to be able to get sustenance from sales. Prior to this period, we would leverage grants and donations to support schools in need which we grow our customer base, network and product stability, after which we would raise our first round of investment for blitz scale