BLIKSEM

Schools teach STEM. We empower changemakers. 

Schools teach engineering content. We teach engineering skills.

Schools educate. We inspire.

We are BLIKSEM. 

Our vision is a world where every individual is empowered. 

Our mission is to upskill everyone in electronics to give them the skills they need to positively impact their communities.

Our values are inclusivity, empowerment and positive change. 

In an increasingly digital world, the greatest change-makers will be those who can learn and master the tools that underpin it. 

We wish to provide everyone with those tools, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or wealth. 

Through a series of progressively challenging activities, if an 8 year old child can learn to not just make electronics gadgets but understand how they work, wouldn't the odds of that child being an adult who can be relied on to solve problems in their community rise? 

Through a simple box, a 10 year old can be introduced to the digital world as a creator, rather than a consumer. That would give the child an edge when they grow up to be a productive member of society. 

With BLIKSEM ELECTRONO, such a noble aspiration is possible. 

We empower every child with not just tools, but a mindset that they too can be agents of change. 

William Kamwemba was inspired by an old text book to build a windmill to save his draught-stricken village in Malawi. Imagine what we could do if we gave the next William Kamwemba a full course in electronics engineering. 

Education opportunities in STEM and other fields for underprivileged and underserved communities in South East Asia is extremely sparse and basic. 
The MIT SOLVE White paper reveals some sobering statistics that are particularly of concern. 

South East Asia is a region of STEM-reliant high economic growth, but because of the divide in accessibility to good STEM resources between the affluent and the underprivileged, vast sections of society have virtually no access to quality education resources and risk getting left further behind.

The field of electronics has impacts far beyond just programming and IoT and other buzzwords. It can light homes, it can power wells, and can harness sunlight to power entire villages, towns and cities. But poverty, gender bias and perception of poor social mobility prevent stakeholders from providing resources for learning this field at a young age.

Some statistics:
4.4m learners aged 7-18 are out of school in Indonesia.
30% of Malaysian children drop out of secondary schooling, and the numbers are similar for Philippines and Thailand.

This is the age where most students are exposed to electronics, and these students miss out.

Already 150 million children in the region deprived of learning due to COVID-19 shutdowns. As the world moves more into online learning platforms, this problem is worsened and the knockdown effect on the economy would be significant. This is exacerbated by the low Internet penetration (60%) in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia that makes home based learning a virtually Herculean task in low income communities.

BLIKSEM ELECTRONO is more than STEM. 

Schools and other institutions teach subjects. We intend to equip individuals with skills. In South East Asia, electronics is taught mostly as a theory subject in schools, and the few skills-based courses are only available to those who can afford them. Even at university level, access, especially in rural and marginalized/underdeveloped regions, is patchy. Furthermore because it is mostly taught in isolated, academic settings, many students don't see a value in learning it.

We are also aware that poverty, inaccessibility and gender biases can be massive barriers to parents and children from even wanting to explore the field of electronics at a young age, and only those who have the means can afford to. 

However there is a great interest in STEM in South East Asia, especially in Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines, where more students want to study STEM than even powerhouses like South Korea. However, the same forces prevent this from becoming reality.

With 30-70% of children in rural areas dropping out of secondary education (where it is first taught), they never get to explore the field of electronics. This keeps them from participating in the digital economy, and their communities continue to be left behind.

These problems are further worsened by the fact that most resources are simply not available to rural communities, where even electricity supply can be oftentimes unreliable. 

The few resources that are available are simply too complex, of questionable quality and/or have no relevance to their daily lives. 

We wish to create changemakers in rural and low income communities in Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. 

BLIKSEM ELECTRONO is a modular, robust, kit-based electronics learning platform that introduces the field of electronics to students of diverse backgrounds and age groups, as young as 8 years old. 

ELECTRONO makes electronics accessible to everyone, regardless of gender, literacy level and background. 

ELECTRONO is designed to inspire students to make a difference in their community through the use of electronics, from making a simple reading lamp to a mobile phone charger powered by sunlight.

ELECTRONO can be used completely offline, even in areas with no electricity and can be used as a completely self-learning tool.

ELECTRONO enhances delivery of STEM and 21st Century skills and provides a strong foundation for work-ready electronics engineers. 

ELECTRONO can be used as a learning aid by teachers who lack high quality electronics education tools. It is benchmarked to the IGCSE Design and Tech syllabus, ensuring that the skills taught are of a high standard. 

ELECTRONO enables equitable access to anyone, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, gender or ethnicity, to quickly acquire critical 21st century skills that would enable them to develop into competent, productive and skilled changemakers of diverse backgrounds. 

The unique combination:

Jan Lambrechts , for the Entrepreneural domain. 

Balaji Narasimhan, for the Content and Skill domain.

covering all aspects to make a difference.

BLIKSEM reverses the traditional teaching/learning model from:

Theory --> Practice --> Learning 

to 

Practice --> Learning --> Theory

By flipping the traditional model on its head we ensure:

1. Students from ANY background, from as young as 8 years old to as old as 88, can benefit from ELECTRONO.

2. Students immediately see the benefits of their work, and therefore see the value in what they learn and can apply it immediately.

3. Demystifies a complex topic like electronics and makes it a subject anyone can explore.

4. Piques their interest to explore, thus driving more self-directed learning.

5. Most importantly, ELECTRONO aims to spark a child's natural curiosity, and use it to inspire change in their communities. 

ELECTRONO addresses a fundamental shortfall in most STEM courses, the adherence to absolute basic fundamentals. By using commonly available parts, we have ensured that ELECTRONO can be easily made compatible with other higher level systems like Arduino and Raspberry Pi to provide a complete learning system for electronics, all the way from components to smart devices. 

ELECTRONO's documentation is also highly illustrative, comprehensive and easily customizable into any kind of proprietary or open-source learning management system, or it can be used completely offline. 

We conducted our first rollout with Muktangan Exploratory, a division of India's largest NGO, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan with 150 students and their parents in December 2017 and signed an MOU with them to supply kits for their Science Fair events. 

We have also conducted sessions with students of three schools in Mangalore, Bangalore and Pune, India with 300 students in February 2018. 

We worked with Malaysia's Science Bridge Academy and Me*Reka Makers Space to provide kits for students as part of an enrichment programme. 

We conducted our first online pilot class with 10's of students from Singapore, Malaysia and India in September of 2020. 

Our kit was tested by 100's of learners across different demographics (age/socioeconomic level) and modified and streamlined based on their feedback. The result is the impactful product we have today. 

ELECTRONO is a modular electronics kit that uses actual components and circuit boards to teach children electronics.

The hardware is a modular system divided into input, output and main modules, colour coded to allow for easy handling and assembly.

The current kit is a result of 8 years of work developing it from scratch, and the intellectual property is fully developed in-house. 

We are currently in the midst of developing an online learning portal using an open source platform. This will be a light, easy to customise and robust enough to cater to learners of all backgrounds. 

The simplicity of the lesson and content portion of ELECTRONO allows us to do this. We have focused on using only the simplest of tools that can be easily accessed or dispatched to anyone living anywhere in South East Asia and beyond. 

We will be able to deliver future lessons, collect feedback, create new projects through our online and offline platforms.

We believe that learning shouldn't be just for learning's sake. We believe in learning for life. 

We believe that anyone, with the right tools, can make a positive impact to their lives, their families and their communities.

Tools in this information age are plentiful. The information about literally everything in the universe is just a few clicks or taps away. However we see the challenge is making individuals feel empowered by this access to these tools to transform the lives of their families and communities. 

An old physics textbook inspired Michael Kamkwamba to harness the wind to pump drinking water to save his drought-stricken village in Malawi. We wish to use electronics as a vehicle to inspire Michael Kamkwambas all over South East Asia and the world, to have an impact on their societies that is both short and long-term. 

ELECTRONO is designed as a series of activities, of increasing complexity to empower a student to, in the short term, obtain a useful skill, and in the long term, to be able to use them to impact their community. 

Every activity in ELECTRONO results in not only academic outcomes, and the production of a working gadget, but our goal is to make every activity something that is of direct relevance to the student, and to get them to explore further what can be done with the gadget they make. From making a simple LED lamp to making a mini mask-washing machine, a hand sanitizer or a solar charger for a mobile phone, we aim to translate these small successes into inspiring someone to light their village street, or provide power for the community using wind and solar power in the long term.

We want to do this by minimizing the theoretical lessons, and letting the student discover their innate skills and directly translate them into ideas for improving their lives, while simultaneously giving teachers a powerful, simple tool to teach electronics in an effective manner.

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Our oldest users are grandfathers and grandmothers with almost no education. Our youngest users are 7 year old children. 

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Every rollout of ELECTRONO included a detailed survey asking about:

• Ease of use (One a scale of 1 (hard) to 5 (easy).)
• Enjoyment of activities 
• Learning outcomes (with specific questions that assessed what they learned and open ended questions)
• Cost (for parents)
• Ideas that our kits inspired (Open ended questions)

Our pilot rollout with Muktangan Exploratory in Pune, India was for a dozen students. Within a few weeks, solely due to world of mouth and minimal advertising, we attracted over a 100 students for our second session. We then were approached by the All-India Association of Catholic Schools to showcase ELECTRONO to schools in Bangalore and Mangalore.

We were invited to showcase ELECTRONO at two different schools in Bangalore and Mangalore, where we conducted several workshops for 300 students from different levels and backgrounds.

Every rollout we conducted was followed by a very thorough feedback and evaluation session that led to further fine-tuning and refinement of projects and documentation. 

We have also rolled out our kits in Malaysia in collaboration with Me*Reka and Science Bridge Academy. We did this to establish in Malaysia in order to outreach into the rural and underserved sections of Malaysian society. 

By 2027: We wish to reach at least 50 underserved communities in each of at least 4 of the 5 countries including Malaysia. This is a very conservative projection as we believe through word of mouth we will reach many more. 

Short term (2022), we wish to acquire the means to produce 1000 kits every 6 months and supply them to our students. We wish to increase the number of kits we ship out by at least 30% every year till 2027 when we are shipping at least 1000 kits a month.

We also wish to establish formal relationships with at least two high impact NGOs in two countries (Malaysia and Vietnam) by 2023 to allow us to distribute the kits and conduct workshops. 

We wish to be able to provide not just the kits, but a full suite of resources that upskills students at every level, from the most basic skills in building gadgets to providing a thorough, skill-based course in electronics.

By 2024 we wish to establish a formally certified course in electronics engineering that allows our students access to courses in local technical institutions.

By 2024, we wish to be able to establish relationships with at least two high impact NGOs in four countries (Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia), and carry on that momentum onto 2027 to reach all five countries by 2027 and beyond. 

We do not want to just be a provider of electronics kits. We wish to be the catalyst for change-makers.

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Our predominant barrier is financing. We started as a team of just 4 individuals who were passionate about electronics and saw it as more than just something to make fantastic gadgets with. Every aspect of ELECTRONO thus far has been completely self-funded and we have offered our kits to all our liaising organisations at or below cost. We have run it as a very tight ship, doing 100% of all its operations in-house. Even so, we managed to, with just the 4 of us, managed to make inroads into India, Malaysia and Singapore. 

We wish to work with NGOs, social enterprises and governments to leverage on their funding sources, and provide them an alternative model to achieve long lasting outcomes, while continuously seeking new partners to manufacture our kits at lower costs. 

We believe with the necessary structure and support system we will be able to inspire countless communities. We have already developed ELECTRONO all the way from a kit about basic electronics all the way to programmable devices and smart devices, so all funding we receive will go to scaling up to a point where we can impact the world, i.e. manufacturing in bulk, reaching out to new markets, establishing relationships and maintaining the learning system. 

BLIKSEM was conceived by Balaji's father, Veerava Narasimhan (Nara) and Balaji's wife Halima in 2012 as an electronics training course. Nara was a prolific engineer and scientist at Philips, Micronas Intermetall and SGS Thomson before retiring in 2010. Not wanting his wealth of knowledge and experience to go to waste, Halima and Nara decided to set up a training course for individuals looking to learn about electronics engineering as a pre-course to polytechnic and university level courses. The idea was to provide a more practical approach to teaching electronics, because it was felt that schools in Singapore (and in India) churned out thousands of graduates with good theory knowledge but a poor grasp of the actual skills that a good electronics engineer needed to have. 

Their work piqued Balaji's interest, who, upon Halima's recommendation, enrolled in an EduTech Entrepreneurship course in Singapore where he met Jan Lambrechts, one of the trainers. Working with Jan, the decision was made to pivot to a kit-based teaching model to allow anyone regardless of background to learn electronics. After another year's work of planning, modelling and fine-tuning, the first ELECTRONO kit was launched in Pune, India.

In 2017, the team moved to Malaysia where BLIKSEM was trialled and rolled out at schools and enrichment centres in Cyberjaya and Kuala Lumpur. 

Unfortunately in 2020, Halima tragically passed away in an accident. Now BLIKSEM carries on in her memory and hopes to achieve her vision for BLIKSEM ELECTRONO as the best teaching platform for electronics engineering.

Balaji Narasimhan - 20 years experience as a teacher.

Jan Lambrechts - 26 years experience as a serial entrepreneur.

Veerava Narasimhan - 42 years as an electronics engineer with some of the biggest electronics companies in the world.

Several consultants, advisers and partners to guide us along the way. 

Veerava Narasimhan (Nara) came from humble beginnings in a small village in Tamil Nadu, India. His passion for electronics is only matched by his passion for teaching and throughout his career, he has trained numerous engineers in India, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries. A firm believer in teaching by doing, he is the brain-child behind BLIKSEM ELECTRONO. 

Jan Lambrechts, a serial entrepreneur from Belgium started his first company when he was 16. Since then he has founded several start-ups and is currently the CEO of Epitome Global, a successful start-up from Malaysia and Singapore in the data analytics space. His passion for social entrepreneurship is what motivated us to seek out NGOs and non-profit organisations as partners. He has worked with underprivileged youth all over world including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, bringing EdTech to the remotest corners of the world. His expertise in this field is critical to BLIKSEM. 

Balaji Narasimhan, a former teacher from the Singapore Ministry of Education is a Public Service Commission scholar, well versed in learning and teaching methodologies that achieve the maximum impact in students. His favourite saying is "learning for life is better than life-long learning". His role in BLIKSEM is the conversion of academic learning outcomes into skills-based results, and ensuring that every aspect of the academic curricula that ELECTRONO is benchmarked to is met and exceeded. 

Our Team Lead Jan was one of the pioneers of cloud computing in the early 2000's with his company, Yuntaa which was one of the earliest cloud storage platforms in the world. In an era where the internet was still in its infancy, Yuntaa quickly became an idea far ahead of its time, as evident by the prevalence of cloud computing today. Working from Belgium with teams in India and Vietnam, Yuntaa went from an idea to service and grew rapidly to hundreds of thousands of customers. 

With regards to BLIKSEM, Jan and Balaji went from ELECTRONO being conceived as a purely electronics kit to one that can also teach programming and building of smart devices. We then approached Nara to incorporate this into ELECTRONO which has led to the latest product of the ELECTRONO series, ELECTRARDUINO which is both, a kit for introducing electronics and one for programming and making smart devices. We then tested it with 20 students in India and have it ready for manufacture. 

MoU signed with Muktangan Exploratory in 2017 to supply kits and train their teachers. This is an ongoing project.

Agreement signed with All India Catholic Schools Association to work with two schools in Bangalore and two in Mangalore to provide kits for upto 300 students each. We conducted the training in 2018 and early 2020 but due to COVID this has been put on hold.

We have several enrichment centres (Science Bridge Academy, Me*Reka Makers' Space in Malaysia, Sciencekits.sg in Singapore) and NGOs (Creative Minds STEM Volunteer Society, Malaysia) and schools (St. Mary's ISC, Mumbai, ELC International School, Sungai Buloh, Malaysia) in the pipeline where we are in the midst of establishing long-term relationships with.

The immediate impact of Winning the Octava Challenge would be to raise the profile of BLIKSEM to investors, partners, governments and high impact NGOs. 

It would open doors and add credibility to our solution as a real, long term solution to a real, long term problem. 

We are right now still just three people with a great idea, proven product and a vision. Winning the Octava MIT Solve challenge would elevate our profile to not just investors but also our potential partners and future customers. 

Winning the challenge would showcase ELECTRONO to the world.

On a macro level, we wish to partner with organisations like Teach for All to allow us to penetrate fully into the most underserved communities in South East Asia.

On a smaller level, we wish to partner with at least two high impact NGOs in each of the countries we are working in to allow us to influence at least 2000 students in each of these markets. 

This would require access to networks that we know that winning Octava MIT-Solve can open doors to.  

More importantly this would also require us to scale up our operations. Our products and manufacturing are already scalable to a near infinite level. ELECTRONO kits can be manufactured in any small factory. The current kits are being manufactured in a small workshop in Mumbai. 

However this scaling up of operations would also require additional man-power, establishment of liaison systems with our partners, establishment of liaison and support offices and other costs that are part of any scale-up operation. Only a fraction of this can be accommodated by lowering of manufacturing costs. Hence we would require funding of about $250,000 as mentioned earlier.