Peekapak

Engaging, Social-Emotional Learning Experiences for PreK-5

Peekapak is an award-winning digital, literacy-based social-emotional learning platform designed for elementary education in pre K-5 levels. Peekapak uses imaginative and diverse characters to tell stories and offers lessons plans and learning games that relate well to children’s experiences in school and at home. These stories and games are made easy to use in the classroom and at home with the provided teacher, and home-based activities for each unit.

Peekapak activities incorporate literacy, read-aloud sessions, group discussions and visual recognition of others’ emotional states. Development of these activities and the stories relating to them were designed using evidence-based practices and have been researched in districts, schools and after-school programs.  Activities were designed to support educators and help them develop approaches to teach young children social-emotional skills, and develop their own understanding of these principles.

Spanning topics from self-regulation to empathy and teamwork, characters and stories help early-years learners develop the appropriate vocabulary to speak about their emotions, as well as provide a visual guide to help identify emotions in others. Topics covered relate directly to Core SEL Competencies and are currently available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.  

Developing these Core SEL Competencies early on has shown to increase academic and social growth of students drastically in school, as well as in professional environments. This has been shown to be particularly true in disadvantaged, ethnically diverse, and low-income communities

By offering myPeekaville, a personalized, game-based learning environment, students can practice social-emotional skills. myPeekaville offers an open game world full of quests that students can embark on by themselves, in their class, or at home with parents.  Students are given the ability to create an avatar that best represents themselves in the world, and they are able to interact with Peekapak’s characters through a series of literacy based games and activities.

myPeekaville allows students to check-in daily and track how they are feeling on any given day. Teachers are able to access detailed analytics on students’ behavior and usage of the game that they can then relate back to academic performance and classroom behavior.

By incorporating both English Language Arts aligned literature and a personalized digital game environment, Peekapak offers a unique set of tools for educators to make use of in their classes, as well as for students and parents to use at home.

Peekapak and myPeekaville incorporate digital technology and game-based learning while being aligned to ELA and literacy standards. This allows educators to incorporate Peekapak's social-emotional skill development directly into their day-to-day lesson plans with no compromise.

myPeekaville, our digital learning game, is essential in allowing students to actively participate in a personalized experience.  Not only can they practice their literacy and social-emotional skills, it engages their problem solving, analytical, and discovery skills. By creating this environment in a digital space, we’re able to draw critical data that can be associated back to students’ academic performance as it relates to their social and emotional well-being.

Peekapak is currently at a growth stage and is expanding into more school districts. We also are working to continue to deliver much requested professional development for teachers in developing students’ social-emotional skills, as well as providing the tools to incorporate directly into their lesson plans. Specifically, with our mood check-in tool, we’re looking to develop a dashboard of useful insights to inform educators on a student’s social-emotional state so they can be proactive rather than reactive to curb behavior incidences. Additionally, our goals are to double our current educator base of 14,000 over the next 12 months.

Within the next 5 years, we plan to expand our curriculum of Pre-K to 3 to encompass early-years education from age 0-3 and provide a full curriculum from Pre-K to 6.  We currently offer English, Spanish and Portuguese and we’d also like to expand the available languages to a wider spectrum in order to reach additional educators and students around the world. We would also like to make the digital game available outside of schools in areas such as libraries and community centers.

Peekapak is currently available completely online and has available printable material so that the curriculum can be used in offline settings. We have also made available our books for purchase as additional offline resources.

Peekapak currently serves over 14,000 educators and 165,000 students across Canada, the United States and around the world.  These users make use of a mix of offline, online and digital game components and incorporate it into their monthly lesson plans.  Our users range from full school districts to single schools or classrooms, as well as home-schools and after-school programs.

Within the range of the next 12 to 36 months, we expect our core user base to more than double as more and more school districts and educators incorporate social-emotional skill development into their core curriculum.  We anticipate that the majority of this growth will stem within the United States and Canada as the need for children to develop their social and emotional skills, particularly in areas affected by low-income, high-risk environments, or prone to the act of bullying identify the need to develop these skills in children at an early age.

Our team is extremely diverse, and has experience in a large range of industries which makes us incredibly flexible to change. Being located in Toronto gives us access to some of the top digital talent in the world, as well as large marketing and funding groups working with educational organisations around the world.

Our current revenue model is a tiered subscription model, offering two levels of access, and per-student bulk pricing.  A SaaS subscription-based model like this allows us to quickly scale up and incorporate new user bases into the platform.  Subscriptions are renewed in full in advance allowing us necessary capital to build and improve upon the product into each new school year.

At Peekapak, we share a similar vision to this initiative - to increase access to high-quality early-learning opportunities by enabling teachers and parents to develop authentic relationships with young children and provide scale-able opportunities via technology. We believe technology is essential in reinforcing student learning while collecting data on student progress for teachers and parents to better understand a student’s needs. We are excited to join the virtual accelerator program to learn about best practices in product design, business models and designing for growth. We are especially interested in partnering with WestEd to learn about best practices in research design.

Our greatest barrier has been obtaining funding for researchers and finding/creating easily implementable tools to measure social-emotional learning indicators at the student level.