RobotWala: AI Based online Platform for STEM Education

AI based virtual character that helps teachers teach hands on STEM education inculcating 21st century skills required for future workforce. 

Problem

• Every country is rushing towards STEM education. However, adoption is inhibited by its multidiscipline nature, inertia of existing work force, associated training time (months) and costs
• STEM education is not about distributing kits or creating maker labs but the real challenge is in the delivery mechanism.
• Sizing the problem:
  • Obama sanctioned $0.5 B to train 100,000 new STEM teachers in 10 years. ($5000 per teacher)

Solution

An AI based virtual character that helps teachers teach hands on STEM education inculcating 21st century skills required for the future workforce. 

Product:

• Online Learning Platform
• Based on School Curriculum (Grades 1 - 8)
• Supporting Educational Kits
• AI based Virtual Character that acts as a virtual teacher guiding the students

Why RobotWala:

RobotWala shall provide countries with a platform that will enable existing teachers to include STEM based inter-disclipinary hands on learning in their curriculums. Using our platform, countries will save billions in cost and years as teachers will not required any extensive training programs. 

With technological advances it has become really difficult for educators to remain updated. It is also not easy to train educators in new technologies as it requires considerable effort in terms of cost and time. Our solution takes the burden off the teachers by providing them with an assistant that takes care of the technology based approach in teaching STEM subjects. RobotWala takes an individualized as well as group based problem solving approach to teach students; Monitoring each student’s as well as the whole class’s performance Robotwala decides what approach to take for each student to get maximum learning benefit. 

RobotWala is an online platform that uses an AI based character to teach children skills of the future. Skills like coding, 3d modeling and printing, game development, electronics, robotics etc are taught using a problem solving based gamified approach. It includes a number of hardware kits that work with the online platform ensuring that the children not only sit on a PC but get their hands dirty as well, which is an essential ingredient in our learning approach.

We have built the basic platform and conducted product testing and market research by running a pilot in low income schools. The outcome of this testing has given us the insight into what needs to be developed in the next prototype. In the next 12 months we will be developing the following

• Working with FUSE Project to design our product
• Working with SPRING Accelerator to position RobotWala for adolescent girls education in Pakistan
• Complete the platform for Grades 1 – 8
• Signup at least 100,000 students in Pakistan (already signed 3250 students within a week)
• Develop the AI based virtual character
• Raise investment of $3 million

LearnOBots have worked in 12 cities of Pakistan with 3500 students. RobotWala is a software based solution that enables us to scale our creative STEM workshops globally within the last week we have signed up 3250 students.

In the next three to five years we plan to expand the reach of our platform globally by partnering up with different organizations like United Nations, ITU and universities like MIT. Next 3 years: changing 1 million lives, Next 5 years: Changing 10 million lives, raising $ 100 million to achieve the goal.

One of the most compelling use case for our solution is low cost. We plan on deploying our solution in the range of $2 ~ $10 a month depending on the market and location. We shall partner with organisations like UN, ITU, TCF, DIL to provide access to RobotWala. Since it is web based, we require basic computer lab with internet connectivity for children to log on and start learning. 

With flexible price plans starting from $2 /month, everyone can have access to quality STEM education. Our model includes buying the hardware on installments ensuring upfront costs don’t inhibit adoption. 

We currently serve around 25 schools with our existing STEAM workshops as after school activities. We plan to offer them RobotWala which shall be included with the School curriculum instead of an optional after school activity.

We expect the basic version of RobotWala to be used by at least 5000 students starting this Fall.This will not include the AI based character for learning. Initially, the solution will include creative step by step tutorials, videos and exercises to guide the students supported by one moderator trained at the School. 

We are currently in talks with a school chain in Pakistan, with 80,000 students. We plan to deploy the first version of our application to existing customers with around 5000 students. In the next 6 months we plan to partner with TCF (The citizens foundation, Pakistan) serving 220,000 students and DIL (Development in Literacy) serving 25000 students.  

In about 3 years we plan to be in at least 10 countries serving around a million students through RobotWala and its associated educational kits. 

Faisal Laghari, CEO / Co-founder

• 9 years: Halliburton, AGCN, 4 small startups
• Businessdevelopment, Sales, Marketing, Operations& Network Engineer. 
• BS Communication systems Engineering-NUST
• RC Fellow-Silicon Valley, YCF-Sweden, Youth Action Net-Washington
• Generated 150x revenue within 2.5 years starting from $2,000 at LearnOBots

Shamyl Bin Mansoor, CTO / Co-founder

• 9 years: Assistant Professor at NUST
• Software & Hardware developer, Curriculum Developer, Robotics, DIY
• Masters in  Computer Science-Seoul University South Korea as HEC Fellow
• Founder of SMART research Lab at NUST, 
• Won PKR 40 million in funding for developing Pakistan's first Surgical Simulator
• CERN Humanitarian Hackathon Participant

Dr Moazam Fraz, Angel Investor / Advisor

• PhD Computer Science
• Rutherford Visiting fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, UK

• Free version (one month subscription): 
  • Onetime: $ 0, Recurring: $ 0
• Basic version
  • Kits & Curriculum (Onetime): $ 1,000 - 3,000, 
  • Monthly subscription: $ 1.5
• Pro version
  • Kits & Curriculum (Onetime): $ 1,000 - 3,000, 
  • Monthly subscription: $ 2 

Market Opportunity:

We have a global solution that can be deployed anywhere in the world. Through the Solve network we would like to partner up to provide RobotWala to different markets where there is a need (practically everywhere). We would also like to raise investment to scale up operations and get access to investors, funds or grants through the Solve network and community.

We have ad a lot of traction with our existing solution of STEM workshops in Pakistan over the past 3.5 years. For RobotWala we require partnerships and support to help deploy our solution to millions of children worldwide. Finding the right partners to act as distribution channels can be a key barrier for our solution to succeed for which we need help. We would also like to generate initial seed funding to develop some aspects of RobotWala.