EduEngage

India has solved the problem of access to education (img.asercentre.org/docs/ASER 2021/ASER 2020 wave 1 - v2/aser2020wave1report_feb1.pdf) but the quality of education is still one that needs to be addressed (Over half of Indian youth will be unemployable in 2030 | NewsBytes (newsbytesapp.com)). Even though there are multiple online educational video platforms, they are not able to deliver results apart from improving the scores of students in exams.

EduEngage wants to incorporate a Game-Based Learning approach to increase the engagement of students and help them understand the core concepts and the values behind each subject more deeply than the way it is done currently.

The problem is noticeable across the world and EduEngage's solution can be scaled globally to solve this problem.

The world needs humans to be independent thinkers, who can be open-minded and curious about new frontiers for solving the problems the world is facing. Unfortunately, problem-solving, decision making, critical thinking, researching, empathy are qualities that a person learns during her school days. The sciences, social studies, and languages all aim at developing a well-rounded human. But if the subjects are not taught in their true spirits, students only learn how to memorize answers which can score the marks. And that is what the problem is with most of the schools in India today.

We are working on solving engagement and access to quality learning experiences through EduEngage.

The problem is so huge that according to a UN report 50% of Indians will be unemployable by 2030. Similar problems can be seen all across the globe, the students are not understanding the Learning Outcomes they are supposed to instead we just have students passing with great grades without ever knowing the true essence of the subjects.

EduEngage wants to solve the problem of engagement in teaching. A more engaged student can focus better on the deeper aspects a subject teaches, and the methods which are used today do not address this. Even the current Ed-Tech industry focuses only on creating videos with few animations to teach a subject.

If a history game is created where the player has to make the decisions that were made by historical characters, she will have a better understanding of why and what happened and the impact of it. Today history in India is only memorization of dates of events for the most part.

EduEngage wants to create games to teach a subject through its gameplay. We do not want to gamify teaching, we want to base education in gaming. A game or interactive module will be created for each subject and a student will learn various aspects of that subject as she progresses through the game.

EduEngage will be using all the current Gaming Technologies, the solution will be developed on Unity platform and currently will be available for PCs in schools. Later on, we hope we will be able to use AR/VR headsets for better engagement.

The target population is the entire country's school going students, but we are going to focus more on the rural population as the rural population has no access to quality teachers or even tutors who will help them.

The current situation for rural schools is that they have been provided with a building, a computer room a small playground as well, but there is no teacher who can use this to teach the students a subject to the levels it deserves to be taught. This creates a disadvantaged situation for the rural kids, as they cannot score in the competitive exams conducted by Colleges/Universities and have to settle for mediocre education and its impact for the rest of their lives.

I have been working with multiple organizations, one of which is Maharishi Karve Stree Shikshan Sanstha, which has schools in multiple rural locations and has students from disadvantaged backgrounds, we have realized the quality of teachers available is not up to the mark. It is a supply problem which cannot be fixed anytime soon as anyone who studies till Masters does not want to go back to village and become a teacher there.

If we start with Game-Based Learning in schools, one of the most important problems of delivering education through fun and engaging way gets solved to a certain extent. Students, as they grow up, can start falling behind in studies, and tendency to leave education for work increases, this is especially true in rural circumstances as the unavailability of good teachers means the student is not interested in any subject being taught.

Game-Based Learning will make sure that at least some amount of interest is developed in multiple subjects and the core concepts which are needed to be grasped for competitive exams are learned. This will mean better University admission and also  a better chance of future.

EduEngage is trying to solve the problem of engagement of students while learning subjects. The reason engagement is important is because without engagement even the best of teachers wont be able to impart any knowledge in the students. We believe engagement is one of the core points which affect the quality of education, a very anecdotal evidence is kids effortlessly memorizing songs they listen to on their favorite cartoons but not remembering poems taught in schools.

Development of Games and other interactive media to improvise student engagement will make sure the quality of education is improved.

The concept stage was selected because we have arrived at the end of our research on Game-Based Learning and ready to start working on the Prototype. We want to try and get the solution right from the early stages itself, with MIT Solve and its partners a lot of nuances in the journey which can be missed by novices can be understood and worked out from the beginning itself.

Having partners to guide us since the start will also relieve us some pressures of figuring out if we are on the right path just by the opportunity of bouncing off the ideas with them.

And as we want to use schools as our partners, it will be of immense help if an organization like MIT Solve will be giving us a stamp of approval.

The current Education Technology industry focuses on learning through videos. But any video above 15 minutes even if it is well-crafted struggles to hold students' attention unless it is very entertaining.

Games have an inherent advantage as they are not passive, you need to be actively engaged in playing them, as there are multiple sensory stimuli that are getting provided, and your brain tricks you into accepting the situation of the game to be the real situation a person is in.

Using games as a medium of teaching will change the education market because every other way can become ineffective when compared to Game-Based Learning(GBL).

The difference between GBL and normal approach according to one study:

Refer: Game-Based Learning Study

Unless a similar approach is taken by everyone, the methods of teaching using videos only even if they have great animations won't be as effective as GBL.

Furthermore, another advantage which this approach gives us is to individualize the difficulty level of the game. After the first few tasks in the game, we can understand the comfort and difficulty which a student can handle of a particular subject. Accordingly, each student can take different path with respect to playing the games and learning at her own pace. This will significantly help even the schools as we can understand the strengths and weaknesses of each student in every subject. A student can be then given special attention early on if we have any significant variance from expected outcomes.

1. As EduEngage is still in the conceptualization stage and prototype building is starting, we are not serving anyone as of now.

2. Within one year we will be reaching at least 1 lakh students within one year.

3. Within five years, we aim at reaching 20 million students across India.

There are 4 ways we will be measuring the progress in the understanding of subject matter in students:

1. Academic performance
2. Teacher's feedback
3. Parent's feedback
4. Quests embedded in games

For our solution, we think these 4 indicators will be the most unbiased way of knowing we are on the correct path towards our goal.

In the longer term, we hope to have a connection with all the schools and students to track their progress in their individual careers as well, to see the bigger longer-term impact of creating valuable citizens is being matched or not.

We will also be following a cluster approach, that is we will target schools in a specific region and then move on to the next region, we will be targeting the macro indicators over the years of how the University admission ratios, employment ratios turn out over the years after students pass out from schools which use our platform.

Currently only I (Pranav Potdar) am working on the solution.

I have completed my engineering in 2018. I have worked with a marketing automation startup post that and then was with a fintech startup. Post that I have been handling my father's organization which is into mechanical design post his passing away in November 2019.

I have been part of an NGO which had multiple education programs, one highlight program called Quantified Cities Movement (link). QCM was also selected in PM Narendra Modi's smart cities programs. We partnered with multiple schools in Pune city to quantify data with the help of students regarding various indicators of better urban conditions, in the process inculcating students with the knowledge regarding what should be the quality of standards acceptable for an urban environment.

I have also worked along with Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Sanstha an educational organization which is into pioneering women's education for more than 125 years. I have conducted various workshops for girls who come from a rural background and are not equipped to work with computers.

I have been brought up with a lot of focus on education as my mother and grandfather both are teachers, and I have seen a lot of their students who came from underprivileged backgrounds end up on a career path and life that would not have been possible without proper educational guidance.

During all these activities I learnt the importance of education in a country like India can make, and I could see that quality of education needs to be improved and scaled.

Currently, as I am the sole member of this team, there is no case for diversity, equity, or inclusion.

But I believe, for us, as our product focuses on lower-income and rural students, all these 3 values are not just something which we should adopt, but they are inevitable if we have to succeed in delivering a successful product. The reason to say this is, even if I have a slight idea about the problems these communities and cohorts are facing, the details which will be needed, for example, the interests of female students belonging to rural areas might be very different than the female friends I have had when I grew up. To make sure our product works across all genders and backgrounds, we have to make sure all three values are at the forefront of our organization's culture.

I believe to achieve this, one goal should be to make sure we always have a certain ratio of minimum representation of every marginalized demographic. This is a crude idea and can be refined over time to include processes to ensure it happens efficiently.

We are trying to solve a problem which is very complex and requires huge amounts of support in terms of guidance and planning. We believe that the Solver community is one of the finest to get the support we need and will help us grow to the targets we want to achieve.

Even though we are working on a solution, we realize that there are a lot of individuals and teams which are working on solving the same problem with their own solutions. To get to collaborate or learn from them to improve our solution (vice versa) will be an opportunity which can accelerate the growth of our solution.

Adding to this, the access we will have to mentors and experts which will be needed to navigate through the plethora of strategic decisions will be invaluable.

And last but not the least, the exposure which a product or business can get due to being on the MIT Solve platform can be entire reason for applying to Solve.

• Human Capital is one of the requirements, we need people who can take ownership of tasks they are doing and deliver results but at the same time always be aware of the longer term perspective of creating the solution to build society which will have smart, caring and independent people. The access which MIT Solver community can provide will be something which no one else can help us with at an early stage.
• Technology is again an area which will be the biggest leverage for the solution. To have access to the finest and advanced technology will be giving us enough leverage to take on the sector which has players with deep pockets.

Unfortunately we have not been able to delve into detailed study of potential partners, but we are open to partnerships with anyone who will help us reach our goals by helping us financially, technically or through our journey with their knowledge in the domain or allied fields.

All across the globe, we have observed a lot of tension and conflict arising due to leaders (political or "protectors of culture") who have taken advantage of illiterate or semi-literate at times even the literate people, to influence them and create an environment of disharmony in the community for their own gains.

It is clear that there are people who have opposed such radicalization from the get go, and one thing which has been common in the ones who opposed is that they are independent thinkers, who can look at what the reality is and the illusion being created and distinguish between the two.

To make sure more of the demographics fall into the above category we need to inculcate a fundamental knowledge of Science, Culture and Logic in them which the schools are meant to do. But what we see happening in Indian schools is production of students who are good at getting grades and getting a degree, the independent thinking is not something which is being inculcated and one of the reasons for it is the quality of teachers who fail to engage students in their respective subjects.

It is evident that the people who have the fundamental knowledge of Science, History and Geography are better at dealing with the issues which can arise when being a part of a community than the ones who do not have such knowledge. By making the education about values which the subjects teach and not just limited to the certain data points which are required for cracking exams, we will be able to create an environment of trust, safety and sustainability.

AI, data science and ML are three technologies which will be extremely beneficial in understanding educational needs and catering of customized solutions to each individual student.

The ultimate aim of education is to create humans who have a set of values which will be beneficial for advancing the humanity to better version of ourselves. In addition to values they need a set of skills to navigate through life.

We for the longest time have tried to use one teacher to teach a subject to entire classroom, the classroom which will have some students who will be able to grasp that subject at higher power, some who will be falling behind and a lot somewhere in the middle. It is really hard to gauge the understanding of each student and delivering the lesson differently to each one. MOOCs have shown that it is extremely beneficial if you let students choose the pace at which they want to study.

We believe that this can be done at much more massive scale when interactive systems are used to teach, take examples of games. If a subject is taught in the Game Based Learning Environment, the game designer has the ability to include multiple difficulty levels which can be adjusted based on the input we are receiving through the player performance.

Massive amounts of Gameplay or interaction data will be generated on the platform which can give us insights into various aspects of education which the current system cannot gauge.

To help us use the data to make sure the product in every loop gets better and better at delivering knowledge and instill values and skills into the students we will require using AI, ML and data science throughout all the products.

If we are given the AI for Humanity Prize then it will be extremely crucial for us as we can use the entire sum to inculcate the best of AI, ML and Data Science techniques to advance the engagement of students using the product.

Every engagement can be made unique the more advance we get in terms of understanding how a student is using the platform. There are multiple types of intelligences - spatial, logical, analytical, etc. Each student will have a different combination of these and will be looking at every problem uniquely. To cater the experience where we enhance each students strengths while simultaneously reducing her/his weakness will go long way into developing smarter and well rounded students.