Kimple Education

Can we speak of a true educational transformation if it does not impact all schools?

SDG 4 encourages us to work for educational quality and equity. And this does not just mean that all students have access to the school, but also to participate in meaningful learning experiences that include innovative methodologies and themes.

We seek to reduce the growing gap between skills currently developed at schools and the ones that are needed for life. For this purpose, we focus on teachers tools and upskilling to implement pedagogical innovation dynamics with their groups.

We identify contemporary, real, challenging and cross-functional content focused on emerging knowledge and skills development, already generating real impact in some classroom, and scale it to be reached by every teacher in the world. 

Kimple is the vehicle to implement pedagogical innovation in every classroom, with an affordable and scalable scheme.

There is a growing gap between teachers’ current skills and the ones required to teach future generations, directly affecting student’s engagement and preparation for their real-world challenges. This happens in almost all countries around the world, with special focus on emerging countries.

We are focused at this very early stage on Spanish speaking countries. Since this problem mainly affects teachers from low and medium class schools from around the world, we estimate it currently impacts around 90% of the total schools of the region, that is, a minimum of 200.000 schools and 130M students in Spain, Latam and the Caribbean. 

We identify the following main factors with a real impact on the problem:

1. Lack of lifelong learning and upskilling programs for teachers on a systematic basis.  

2. Limited access to different methodologies and innovative content, which are usually kept to high-income private schools that can afford teacher training as well as innovative content.  

3. Connectivity gap increases inequitable access to digital learning processes.

Kimple is a tool that helps to narrow these differences by improving teachers' capabilities that will help students to succeed in this XXIst Century with the same opportunities. 

Kimple is  an innovative educational marketplace with classroom dynamics for teachers, created by experts and authors around the world, focused on emerging knowledge and the necessary skills for students to learn how to get along and how to change the world we live in. 

All dynamics include all the information needed for teachers to implement them with their students, combining methodological and theoretical training and support for teachers, with specific strategies and suggestions to guide students in any learning environment.

All the resources at Kimple provide dynamics that foster learning by projects and developing skills and abilities such as Problem-solving, flexibility, critical Thinking, initiative, perseverance, creativity, resilience and others. As for the topics, we cover real world challenges such as SDG, Sustainability, sexual-affective education, socioemotional learning, computing, among others.

Teachers can access content, fostering their upskilling with each lesson, select dynamics for their classes, as well as build their own educational paths according to the needs of their students, by creating individual and collaborative folders that they share with their students.

90 % of our dynamics are designed for an offline classroom implementation, since we promote experiential learning and we make it available to rural  and low-digital areas.

Kimple is the result of 5 years working in Latin America. Visiting schools and working closely with teachers. In this time, while implementing diverse educational projects, we visited more than 1.000 public, private and chartered/ semi-granted schools across Latam, many of them in rural and vulnerable environments, and shared directors and teachers' concerns about education.  

Throughout this journey we have come to understand that schools share the following main challenges:

• How to continuously train teachers on new pedagogies and content, with a lack of time and ressources to do so.

• How to address students’ skills development and bring the real world challenges to the classrooms. Teachers mainly receive traditional curricular content, and to address the skills and new content challenge, are forced to develop their own materials, with a clear lack of time, salary, training and tools to do so.

Schools and teachers are totally aware of their challenges in training the new generations, but they lack tools to face them. Our conclusion is that there is a real need for a new content model focused on teachers, that can help them in their life-long learning and support them with specific suggestions and dynamics to guide their students, helping to develop new skills both in teachers and students. 

Given the limited time and, in many cases, the scarce connectivity of schools and teachers, we are committed to a model that combines asynchronous teacher accompaniment with specific application proposals in the classroom. This model allows great scalability and adaptability to the times and resources of the schools. 

The focus on teachers and this combination of training and classroom practice is the differential key highlighted by teachers and schools, due to their practicality and accessibility.

During our development phase, Kimple has been co-created and tested with several directors and teachers from urban and rural areas, low and medium income, in Spain and Argentina, receiving direct suggestions from them. We are currently working with schools in both countries, and we keep receiving feedback and content demands, feeding the product constant growth and adaptation to teachers’ needs.

We have created a platform for teachers, as the main actors to implement real and sustainable changes in education, as well as the group that currently needs the most tools to adapt their teaching-learning processes. 

Combining online training with innovative lesson plans to address student’s skills development and emerging knowledge learning, Kimple is the tool that can lead change in XXIst Century schools, helping teachers to adapt the learning processes to the challenges of their students, and promoting students engagement by participating in meaningful learning experiences that include innovative methodologies and themes.

We started the project design and definition in March 2018. After the design stage, we partnered with Wolox in October 2018, an Argentinian software developer, to build the platform, together with teachers from Spain and Argentina. Platform developments took place from that month until now, where we have built our own team for maintenance and growth. 

We ended our first commercial MVP in Nov 2019, where we started our first approaches to schools in Argentina, and we had our first 8 licensed customers at the beginning of the school year in Argentina, in March 2020. Nowadays we count on licensed schools in Spain and Argentina, with an established product and a validated business model, and are focused on growth, in our current and new regions in LATAM, urban, rural, low/medium income schools.

Our innovation relies on our business model, creating a new educational content value chain that combines 2 main unique factors:

• Strategically we impact on teachers and students, not only students. We have created a model for teachers, combining training and specific classroom dynamics. This is unique and has a multiplying effect, promoting a sisteming impact/ change.

• In terms of business model, through our marketplace we transform the value chain by transferring the long tail concept to schools. Making available for every teacher great projects with demonstrated success. 

This two main keys generate the following benefits and disruptions: 

1. Global knowledge and new players into schools: We transfer knowledge between schools and countries. International specialists, teachers, foundations, social activists, referents and authors with leading projects, distribute their courses throughout our platform, accessible for all teachers.

2. Scalable: Our digital platform allows multicultural, leading and diverse educational projects to reach schools across the globe with limited investment, under a revenue sharing scheme. 

3. Teacher centric B2B2C: teachers will learn how to innovate in the classroom. A solution for all types of schools that are looking to catch up with the real world and to support their teachers with ongoing training and skills development.

4. Focus on emerging trends: To achieve a significant change (impact) we suggest exploring contemporary, real and cross functional cases in classrooms.

5. Faster and innovative: Our marketplace model facilitates the entry of new content into schools in a faster manner as well as give us the detection of new trends and needs.

The current number of people Kimple is serving is 387 teachers, which impacts about 15.400 students, both in Spain and Argentina. 

In one year we hope to serve more than 1200 teachers, impacting approximately 50.000 students, in Argentina, Spain, Chile, Perú and Colombia.

In 5 years, we expect to reach 25.000 teachers and 1M students at least in several countries in Latin America and Spain.

We are now starting to generate our first alliances with NGOs, to access vulnerable schools and teachers with their help and synergies. We are currently working with our first NGO in Argentina, affecting 15 volunteers and 200 adolescents at risk of school dropout. 

In one year we hope to build alliances with more than 10 NGOs, reaching 150 teachers/ volunteers, impacting approximately 2.500 students in vulnerable environments. In 5 years, we expect to reach more than 6.000 teachers/ volunteers and 250.000 students in vulnerable environments.

Since we are a marketplace, on the supply side, we expect to be the tool to reach schools for many authors and experts, who otherwise could hardly get their content to teachers and learners. We point to be the supplier of hundreds of courses and learning paths from dozens of experts from around the world. 

Nowadays we distribute content from 15 different authors from 6 different countries. We expect to be working with 25 suppliers in one year and, in five years, we hope to be distributing content from hundreds of them.

We are currently measuring our progress with the following figures and indicators:

• Number of teachers reached

• number of students impacted

• Number of schools reached in vulnerable environments

• Dropout rate 

We are working to measure other indicators that demonstrate a qualitative social impact such as:

• Bullying decrease in schools.

• Improvement in relationships between teenagers (friends and couples).

• Decrease in the contraction of STDs.

• Improvements in the consumption of energy and water in schools.

Full time staff: 6

Part-time staff: 1

Contractors: 1

Kimple is the result of adding up a leading pedagogical and management team with high experience in developing and implementing educational proposals for schools and a leading IT team, specialized in digital disruption. We believe that this combination is key to success, combining high-quality educational knowledge and disruptive IT methodologies.

As for our team:

• Pina de Paz: More than 10 years of experience in the design and implementation of educational solutions, both in private and public sectors. Spain Acumen Fellow 2021. She has led the digital strategy and sales team for an International publishing company and advised public administrations in Latin America in educational projects. A resilient leader.

• Victoria Amerio: Psychologist, teacher, teacher trainer and more than 20 years of experience in educational content development. Senior pedagogical advisory for a school publishing company for many years. A consistent and team-worker pedagogue.

• Belén Pozzi: A centennial, native sustainable, close to the challenges of our young people. She has experience in editing, translating and communication, with a global and sustainable vision passionate about generating impact in societies. A young potential achiever.

• Katrine Poulsen and Martín Perez: Experienced Team Manager and developer, passionate with Kimple and with the global impact of technology and teaching. A business oriented IT team.

• Maira Farías: Pedagogical advisor with experience in Argentina and Spain, specialized in special needs for learning.

• Ana Redondo: Experienced educational advisor to schools in Spain.

• NEW ENTRY: in search of a leader to develop our presence in LATAM.

• International founders, advisors and mentors.

We believe that the positive impact in education and in the world we seek to make needs to come from a team that works in a secure and happy environment with multiplicity of points of view. One of our main goals at Kimple is to embody first on a small scale the change we would like to see globally. 

We work from 7 different cities around the world, and our team members' ages go from 20s to 50s. When incorporating a new member, we prioritize skills over hard knowledge, and promote continuous training (2 of our 7 employees are currently studying their masters degrees). 

Our head of technology was hired at the beginning of her pregnancy and we are proud to welcome her daughter as part of our family. Our schedules are flexible and to be able to combine our profession with other aspects of life we have a goal-orientated work policy. Three of our team members are moms and during COVID-19 one of our goals was to ensure a flexible work environment compatible with kids' virtual class schedules.

Most of our team members are female (6 out of 8), and we have diverse sexual orientations and are open about it! We seek to reflect in all Kimple projects our values of diversity and respect.

As a team we work horizontally and with absolute transparency: we have a weekly meeting in which all team members are invited to participate in all projects (pitching ideas or investing work time as well). 

Kimple’s spirit is to gather as many agents as possible working for educational transformation in an efficient, scalable and accessible manner. We truly believe in building valuable alliances and partnerships with a common ground to generate wider and long-term impact in our communities. We need to join forces, ideas and proposals and generate long-term synergies to succeed in the reinforcement of learning systems and teachers empowerment globally.

This is the main reason why we apply to the TPrize Challenge, to learn from others, grow with others, and help each-other in this educational challenge.

Our solution is perfectly aligned with the TPrize Equitable Classrooms Challenge, and we expect to:

• Reach the more teachers possible to free access to Kimple, and help them grow and train future generations in contents and skills key for their personal, social and professional development.

• Gain international validation and visibility, that will help us to generate alliances and synergies with local Foundations and NGOs in order to reach our impact objectives (at least 25% of our teacher users from vulnerable environments).

• Connect with others, learn from them and collaborate to generate synergies.

• Learn from your experts.

• Get access to new alliances to underpin Kimple in the region, boosting our growth.

• Having the possibility of partnership with you, in terms of research and, hopefully, develop a seal/ certification for schools.

• Earning the grant, that will be an important help during this critical year for the project.

• To grow and succeed!

At this phase of our project, we would prioritize 3 types of partnerships:

• NGOs conducting educational projects with schools and teachers in vulnerable environments, to generate synergies with Kimple empowering teachers and schools in all contexts, with the aim of training future generations in contents and skills key for their personal, social and professional development. We would act as facilitators and effectively offer new contents, authors and learning methodologies that encourage educational innovation in schools in any kind of context, promoting equitable, high-quality education.

• Universities and Foundations that can help us develop, track and evolve our impact metrics and to co-create a sustainability or impact certificate for teachers or schools.

• Teachers, specialists and authors, to bring specialist voices and topics to the classroom in order to promote responsible and active citizenship.

We have identified several Solve Members, besides MIT faculty itself, that can fit in one or more partnership opportunities from below. Some examples can be: 

• Tecnológico de Monterrey.

• Straubel Foundation.

• The People's Prize

• Patrick J. McGovern Foundation

• The Elevate Prize

Education in emerging knowledge promotes smart, safe, and sustainable communities. Kimple encourages this work at a global level through the analysis of problems and the solution to daily problems with our computational thinking programs, resulting in more efficient and intelligent communities and cities. From the global citizenship axis, we promote the full development of students as responsible citizens and involved with their neighbors, thus improving their ties and fostering respect, which directly impacts on community safety. All our educational resources are oriented towards the realization of the SDGs, with a special focus on environmental education and sustainability. In addition, we have a job placement program for young people, with the intention of facilitating their insertion into the adult world at the end of their school studies.

Our resources promote gender equity and the reduction of male violence. We work together with NGOs to promote SDG 5 by bringing teachers resources on the labor reality of women, access to the education of girls, and using art as a tool to prevent male violence in adolescent relationships. Our GOAL is to improve the reality of women through the knowledge and transparency of inequities and promoting transversal work in the classroom to lay new foundations in relation to gender.

Kimple seeks to renew “the what and how” of educational content that reaches schools and teachers today, making educational transformation possible through new knowledge and pedagogical ways that promote the development of essential skills for new generations in order to reach a more equitable and sustainable world. Diversity, environment, digitization, information verification, globalization, equality and other social, political, environmental or economic challenges are some of the topics addressed at Kimple. Included in 3 interconnected dimensions that help us in the formation of a conscious, comprehensive, responsible and global citizenship committed to the promotion and defense of the Sustainable Development Goals.