Engaging STEAM education for Vietnamese children

The problem that we are aiming to solve is students in Vietnam do not have equal access to high-quality and engaging STEAM education. This issue is caused by (1) outdated curriculums (2) a shortage of qualified STEAM teachers and (3) the financial divide between rural and urban areas. 

First, Vietnam's existing STEAM curriculum is out of date because we are using resources that were designed years ago (many schools are still teaching Pascal). It could take months, if not years, to update the curriculum in the educational system. Furthermore, the majority of high-quality learning materials are written in English. Only a small number of Vietnamese students can learn in English, making it even more difficult for policymakers, educators, and even self-learners to gain access to a curriculum specifically catered to Vietnamese.

Second, qualified STEAM teachers are in short supply in Vietnam. The shortage is considerably more severe in rural areas. In fact, the teachers who can supply the highest-quality materials are either international or Vietnamese experts who work for large corporations, teach at top universities, and live abroad. Students in Vietnam, whether in the city or in the countryside, have few opportunities to learn directly from these experts.

Third, even if these experts are available in Vietnam, the cost of learning from them or studying overseas is prohibitively expensive. Even the expense of learning (laptop, internet access, energy, etc.) can be a financial burden for some students.

As of 2021, there are approximately 17 million Vietnamese in the school-attending (6-18) age group. These numbers will increase to 24 million students in the next three years. This issue impacts students in 63 cities and provinces across the country.

Lack of access to high-quality STEAM education may hinder children in Vietnam from reaching their full potential and becoming globally competitive in the future.

We solve this challenge at scale by pioneering the OMO model enabled by cutting-edge technology, original content, field-experienced instructors, and operational excellence.

The Online-merge-offline (OMO) concept allows one exceptional instructor to educate and engage with thousands of students on a real-time basis, minimizing the requirement for certified local STEAM teachers. Students can be located anywhere and receive additional assistance from local teachers or remote teaching assistants. 

Our technology ecosystem consists of four components: (1) a learning management system (LMS), (2) a live app that allows students to interact with content, classmates, teaching assistants, and instructors during live lectures, (3) a social network for students to connect and share their work (STEAMESE Profile), and (4) an analytics platform for learning recommendation and product improvement. This ecosystem is fueled by gamified, engaging content; each course is similar to a TV show, and each lecture is similar to an episode with a defined goal.

The curriculum is created by industry experts and adapted from global leading institutions. We have reduced the financial hurdles for students, particularly those in remote areas, by making the curriculum free and available online.

In addition to providing foundational STEAM knowledge, equal access to STEAM education nurtures crucial competencies for children's future success, particularly problem solving and creative thinking. These skills promote individual improvement and enhance the quality of the Vietnamese workforce, benefiting the country's economic growth and welfare.

We focus on Vietnamese children aged 8-16. As of 2020, there are approximately 17 million children in this age group. They live in all 63 cities/provinces of Vietnam. Nearly 50% of these cities have an average personal income of less than $2000/year (appx. $170/month).

Our team members come from all walks of life and live in more than ten different time zones. Our executive team is 50 percent female. Female teachers and TAs make up over half of our faculty.  Some of the volunteers have won International Math Olympiads and founded businesses. Others are engineers, marketing/sales leaders from tech giants (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Airbnb), and graduates from prestigious universities (Harvard, Stanford, University of Cambridge). On the other hand, some are college students or professionals at small businesses in Vietnam. With their passion and deep understanding of Vietnam, they sympathize with the struggles that teachers and students in our country face and offer solutions that truly help students grow faster.

Our selection procedure guarantees that we select not only applicants with great technical backgrounds, but also team players that fit into our culture and are sincerely committed to our objective. Currently, we have team members in different departments: Engineering (30 people), Marketing (15), Operations (20), Funding and partnership (5), Education (50), Customer service (10), Data science (10).

We create a flat structure in which all members have access to the executive team. Each team member is in charge of their own project. As a result, our members exhibit a high level of innovation and accountability in completing their jobs.

Our team is trained to master the use of Steamese Profile, an in-house educational social network. This  platform was built for our young students to: communicate with one another after class, exchange knowledge and ideas in the same way that they would if they were studying in person, and present their weekly work for inspiration. We then conducted focus groups with parents and children to get feedback, held a UX sprint to create UI mockups, and mapped out the essential user journeys. Our engineering team immediately created a minimum viable product (MVP) and specified analytics events to track progress. Organic adoption was overwhelmingly positive thanks to the product-market fit.

To strengthen our understanding and value creating, we have been working with local and international corporations, schools, and other institutions. 

First, we have been partnering with five local elementary and secondary schools to bring SFV into their curriculum. School partnership is considered one of our main strategies to bring SFV to as many students as possible. The pilot in five schools this fall has given us valuable lessons to expand our network of schools in the future. 

Second, we have been partnering with corporations to improve the efficiency of their CSR programs in Vietnam. For example, in November 2020, IBM Vietnam granted us $12,000 to co-organize the “TJBot workshop on Robotics and AI” for teachers from all 63 provinces in Vietnam. These teachers can now use the educational resources we provided to prepare for longer training programs in the future. 

Third, we have been partnering with other NGOs to further reach disadvantaged children. Joining forces with UNICEF Vietnam, we are planning for a comprehensive package of affordable devices, internet connectivity, and STEAM education for children in remote areas. Additionally, we have been organizing workshops and short training sessions for students from Pacific Link, an organization that empowers girls in areas with a high risk of trafficking.

MIT Solve would help us accelerate our near-term goal of building a sustainable operating model and developing appropriate impact measurements and monitoring and evaluation frameworks we scale up exponentially. 

First and foremost, we would love to learn from your expertise in social entrepreneurship and mentorship program on the path of growth and sustainability. The customized support program which is operated by both MIT Solve would be very helpful for us in determining priorities and allocating resources accordingly. Additionally, your expertise in content development and evaluation would help us make sure that our program would meet the highest global standards and efficacy study requirements. This is critical for us to achieve before we implement our program across Vietnam, including public schools.   

Second, your network of connections would folster a community to advance our mission with like-minded partners. We would appreciate the opportunity to share knowledge and experience with social innovative organizations in your network to together help underserved children reach their full potential. For example, your connection with the most prestigious technology universities in the US would help us make sure that our programs will fully equip Vietnamese students with critical STEAM foundation and then enable them to be able to compete globally in the future.

Last but not least, your financial contribution would accelerate our growth plan by funding our full-time team who will be responsible for expanding STEAM for Vietnam to more schools across Vietnam, training FDTA (forward deployment teaching assistants), and assisting students with registration and learning journey. The funding and connections would also power us to offer a comprehensive package including device and connectivity besides our signature STEAM programs for more underserved students.

STEAM for Vietnam transforms tech education into a unique experience using the project-based approach. Unlike traditional heavy curriculum teachings with a teacher-centered approach, we encourage our students to actively study and interact with one another. Our courses are well-written and structured similar to a TV show. Our students learn as they complete the tasks (in the form of minigames) with guidance from the “hosts”, which are our highly skilled lecturers. Each fraction of knowledge that our students gain during class will build on the valuable skill set to carry out the final course project. With this approach, STEAM for Vietnam strives for the following impacts: (1) our students to naturally acquire one of the most complicated knowledge, (2) the fun and excitement in our course to spark a desire to learn within our students, (3) the effectiveness of our solution will positively impact Vietnam’s K-12 curriculums for the greater good of Vietnamese children. 

In order to implement the model, we’ve built an ecosystem including (1) a Learning Management System (LMS) to manage students, courses, tests, and student support, (2) a Live app, a web application that allows students to participate in live lectures and interact with contents, classmates, teaching assistants, and instructors in real-time, (3) STEAM Profile, a social network for students to connect and share their works and experience learning STEAM with others, similar to “LinkedIn for children”, and (4) an analytics platform to capture and analyze student’s studying activities for recommendation and prediction as well as product and content improvement

Our goals for 2022 are to: (1) increase our student population to 100,000, (2) expand our school network to 30 schools, and (3) raise $200,000 in total funding.

Currently, we have 30,000 students enrolled. In the spring semester of 2022, we have experimented two new courses in Computational Thinking and Introduction to Robotics with 5,000 students. In addition to our continuing marketing and partnerships, we are launching a major marketing campaign in the summer of 2022, which will include a bus trip across Vietnam and a National Hackathon. We will travel from the north to the south of the country on the bus tour, reaching out to rural children and launching a social movement encouraging students, families, and schools to participate in STEAM education. We also plan to host the first national Hackathon in the summer in collaboration with our partners. As a result, the fall semester of 2022 will see a significant increase in enrollment. In school partnership, we are now working with FPT Group to finish implementing STEAM education across FPT's 20-campus school system.

In the longer term, our goal is to serve one million students. If even a small percentage of this group becomes software engineers, product managers, or data scientists; and the remaining students pursue other fields with high productivity and can compete globally, the new generation of workforce will transform the entire economy and welfare. 

Partnering with UNICEF, we are committed to (1) ensuring that children and adolescents are provided with online (and offline toward online) learning opportunities that are of quality to help enable them to reach their potential; (2) evaluating and institutionalizing technology-based approaches at all levels of education to empower and support teachers with new personalized and adaptive learning techniques, and 3) developing a tool to measure the impact on learning outcomes, particularly for vulnerable children, such as ethnic minority girls.

We are measuring our progress through enrollment count, student project completions and retention. Our first summer bootcamp in August 2020 had 7,500 students participating in Computational Thinking & Intro to Programming courses from 34+ countries and completed 10,000+ coding projects. Our Spring bootcamp in February 2021 had 2,500 students participating in Computational Thinking & Intro to Programming course with 2000 students participating in the Computer Science course.

We seek to make an impact in a few key areas: (1) increase education access for children to overcome geographical and socioeconomic barriers, (2) inspire students to seek STEM careers hence closing the long-standing gender gap, and uplevel the next generation of Vietnamese workforce (on par with Silicon Valley). With these goals in mind, we measure our impact with a few indicators. Firstly, as our course offerings grow, the number of students increases from 3,000 to 30,000 students within a year. SFV recognizes that financial constraints are a significant barrier, so we continue to look for ways to lower related educational costs, such as working with partners to sponsor free Robotics VEX hardware for all students. Second, we aim for greater geographic reach: at least one school in each of Vietnam's 63 provinces participates in the Robotics program. We also sponsored seminars across the country to educate and train teachers so that they could share what they learned with other teachers in their province. Finally, it is critical to set an example for students and eliminate gender bias, especially at a young age. Our instructors and TAs are likewise 50/50 female:male, providing role models for the kids. To combat gender prejudice, we included more gender-agnostic learning characters in the curriculum development process. We also ensure that female students are aware of STEAM education through strategic partnerships such as techtalks and sponsorships for women-related NGOs.

Through providing equal access to high-quality STEAM education, we aim to equip Vietnamese children with necessary skills to compete globally in the future. The goal is that after students finish our program, they are fully prepared to either enter the workforce or to continue further education in technology. If they choose not to follow a tech career, STEAM learning nurtures the skills that are critical for future success, especially problem solving and creative thinking. In an era driven by technological advancement,  rapid change makes knowledge quickly obsolete. However, the ability to think logically and to create innovative solutions will help students solve complex problems throughout their lifetime. These skills foster the advancement of each individual, improve the quality of Vietnamese workforce, thus boosting Vietnam’s economic growth and welfare.

Our course roadmap includes a three-year computer science curriculum along with critical yet practical Science, Engineering, Math, and Art. Each semester, we introduce a new course; we currently offer four courses including Computational Thinking; Python; Robotics; and Web development. 

In addition to programming skills, we encourage students to gain other analytical skills such as critical thinking, cooperation through team projects, and presenting skills through final projects. As teachers, our software engineers and tech professionals not only provide academic information, but also practical and standard working methods.

To be able to support students across the country, we not only deliver lessons to students but also provide professional development training to local teachers, whom we refer to as  “forward deployment teaching assistants” (FDTA). So far, we have trained more than 200 local teachers in Computational Thinking, Programming with Python and Introduction to Robotics. We conduct system training to ensure that teachers are familiar with our ecosystem and academic training. As a result, FDTAs can support students in person efficiently besides the instruction of main teachers who are software engineers and can teach from anywhere in the world.  

All of the classes are operated online, using the technology ecosystem. Our software and its foundational infrastructure have been crucial to the success of our students during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they will continue to be crucial for our mission of providing accessible education to students in Vietnam. The entire infrastructure is hosted on Cloud Services Providers, primarily DigitalOcean, and on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for some specialized services.

Using Dockerized containers and Kubernetes, all of our platforms, including Open EdX Learning Management System, STEAMESE Profile Social Learning Network, Live App, Analytics Platform, and others, are structured as linked micro-services. We currently run 10 Kubernetes clusters, 70 computing machines, and 15 managed databases, among other things. With our rising user base, these numbers are projected to skyrocket in the near future (7.5X active user growth last year). We'll also have more complicated requirements, requiring more specialized micro-services (e.g., identification, alerts, and search) that are critical to our offerings.

Our cloud infrastructure also enables us to operate with a data-driven culture. We built an Analytics Platform using ElasticSearch to collect data across all our platforms, set up Airflow pipelines to orchestrate data transfer from different sources, and leveraged GCP’s BigQuery and Data Studio to power data visualization and machine learning development.

Our instructors and TAs are 50/50 female:male, providing role models for the kids. To combat gender prejudice, we included more gender-agnostic learning characters in the curriculum development process. We also ensure that female students are aware of STEAM education through strategic partnerships such as techtalks and sponsorships for women-related NGOs.

We provide very quality STEAM education by pioneering the OMO model enabled by cutting-edge technology, original content, field-experienced instructors, and operational excellence. Our very lean operating model along with strong support from the entire community allows us to teach students for FREE.

We serve students aged 8-16 in Vietnam across all 63 provinces. If a small percentage of this group becomes software engineers, product managers, or data scientists; and the remaining students pursue other fields with high productivity and can compete globally, the new generation of the workforce will transform the entire economy and welfare. 

The OMO concept allows one exceptional instructor to educate and engage with thousands of students on a real-time basis, minimizing the requirement for certified local STEAM teachers. Students can be located anywhere and receive additional assistance from local teachers or remote teaching assistants. 

Our technology ecosystem consists of four components: (1) a learning management system (LMS), (2) a live app that allows students to interact with content, classmates, teaching assistants, and instructors during live lectures, (3) a social network for students to connect and share their work (STEAMESE Profile), and (4) an analytics platform for learning recommendation and product improvement. This ecosystem is fueled by gamified, engaging content; each course is similar to a TV show, and each lecture is similar to an episode with a defined goal.

The curriculum is created by industry experts and adapted from global leading institutions. We have reduced the financial hurdles for students, particularly those in remote areas, by making the curriculum free and available online.

In addition to providing foundational STEAM knowledge, equal access to STEAM education nurtures crucial competencies for children's future success, particularly problem solving and creative thinking. These skills promote individual improvement and enhance the quality of the Vietnamese workforce, benefiting the country's economic growth and welfare.

With the OMO learning model, our students from anywhere can learn from world-class instructors for free. The technology infrastructure is empowered by operational processes that we have been continuously working on to open new classes quickly at scale. On average, it takes us up to four weeks from planning to run a live class. This way we have been able to create a platform for schools, corporate and other partners to join our efforts and quickly reach scale. For example, private schools and top technology universities have been contributing classrooms and teaching assistants to make “in-person” support available along with online learning. For students who study from the comfort of their home, they receive live support from our teaching assistants remotely along with their parents on-site. 

Our product roadmap includes fundamental to advanced STEAM courses and we plan to offer three additional courses per semester. In the longer term, we would like to introduce STEAM for Vietnam into the school system and expand our students to different age groups. 

SFV’s path to financial sustainability involves (1) a lean operating model and (2) a future stable revenue stream through the STEAMese Alliance membership program. We will continue to operate with a large volunteer-based crew. The current average cost per student is 2 USD. We expect to maintain this cost structure even when we scale up. The STEAMese Alliance membership program is still in its early stages of development. In this program, SFV will provide schools and other educational institutions optional premium services (on top of our free services) for a predetermined annual cost, providing a predictable cash stream to balance our expenses. The STEAMese Alliance membership program only needs a fraction of the schools’ operational budget to become viable and sustainable. In addition, we will continue to use current funding methods to expedite our growth, including (1) Family donations (on average parents donate $20 per student), (2) Corporate donations (we have received many donations from companies such as IBM, Vincom, Kaxim, and others as our interests align with theirs), and (3) Grant applications (American Center committed to supporting us annually).

Our innovative technology ecosystem and original content have been developed and implemented by our 100% volunteer-based team. These are world-class engineers, product managers, data scientists, business professionals and students in prestigious universities; who also really buy-in to our mission and share the same desire to transform our dear home country through the project.

We have raised more than $100K so far, including:

• Employee matching ($30k). 

• American Center Hanoi and Hochiminh city ($27K) with annual commitment.

• Corporate social responsibility program ($20k). For example, in November 2020, IBM Vietnam granted us $12,000 to co-organize the “TJBot workshop on Robotics and AI” for teachers from all 63 provinces in Vietnam. These teachers can now use the educational resources we provided to prepare for longer training programs in the future. 

• Family donation and Tuesday giving campaign: $30K. 

As a non-profit organization, we plan to continue our lean operation model based on volunteer and our funding mechanism. In the near future, we will launch the STEAMese Alliance program and license the technology platform to strengthen our funding structure and assure us with financial sustainability. We have received interests from schools to pay a membership fee as they have seen the value of our program to supplement core education programs in their schools. In this program, SFV will provide schools and other educational institutions with optional premium services (on top of our free services) for a predetermined annual cost, providing a predictable cash stream to balance our expenses. The STEAMese Alliance membership program only needs a fraction of the schools’ operational budget to become viable and sustainable. 

With average cost to serve per student is $2 and going down to $1, in order to serve 100k students this year, we will need about $200k.