ICANDO

Similar to other countries, Indonesian early learners, who are in their prime, are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, Indonesian students consistently underperformed in literacy, mathematics, and science when compared to other OECD member countries, as evidenced by periodic PISA tests. The condition was then jeopardized by the pandemic, which was caused by school closures beginning in early 2020 and an inability of the infrastructure to support online learning. With many parents facing job loss or wage reduction, early education is frequently overlooked. Prior to the pandemic, only 38% of early learners were enrolled in school. The figure was then projected to decline by 50% by mid-2020. Additionally, in 2021, the Indonesian Ministry of Education conducted a study of lower primary school students across the country and discovered that they were 5 months and 6 months behind in numeracy and literacy, respectively. With this background, a reorientation program will be difficult to implement without the empowerment of teachers and parents. In Indonesia, only 47% of early childhood educators have a diploma. The majority of them are women who are also struggling financially to support their families, necessitating the addition of a second job or two. Indonesian parents, on the other hand, are rarely involved in their children's education. During the pandemic, online learning was extremely difficult for early learners, all the more so because parental engagement is critical prior to or during the learning process, but those parents are also juggling work from home. The interrelated challenges necessitate collaboration within the community to resolve them. However, some persons who wish to donate are unable to do so due to a shortage of channels. If there are any, their transparency is unclear, and they lack distinctive rights to participate in decision-making on how to solve problems.

ICANDO provides integrated game-based learning materials to students, parents, and teachers as formative assessment tools. This allows students to enjoy learning while parents and teachers collaborate more effectively in planning, monitoring, and evaluating students' progress. This solution is implemented in a variety of ways:

1. Providing early learners with access to ICANDO Kids, a collection of over 2,000 interactive assessment materials in a form of games which are designed toward the development of fundamental and durable skills.

2. Empowering teachers through the use of ICANDO School, a learning management system that alleviates administrative burdens and enriches instruction with step-by-step guides to innovative learning. The LMS is integrated with ICANDO Kids, which enables teachers to use the game for assessment purposes and to deliver more personalized learning when necessary based on recorded attainment data.

3. Equipping parents with ICANDO Parents, that are connected to ICANDO School in order for parents and teachers to communicate effectively about their children's learning. Additionally, parents receive parenting tips to assist their children in adjusting to post-pandemic schooling.

4. Developing community-based game-based solutions in rural areas that lack internet connectivity. For these areas, we collaborate with the local authority to provide the "SMART TABLE," a table equipped with four tablets that contain ICANDO and can be used offline. The table is connected to ICANDO Village, a dedicated platform to be used by parents, volunteers from the Family Welfare Programme, or local administrators to deal with not only children education but also their welfare and wellbeing. 

5. Utilizing NFT to invite investors or donors to take part in our solution. This way, people who are concerned about early learners’ education will have a transparent channel to participate in the solution. 

In implementing the aforementioned solutions, we recognize the lack of digital literacy among teachers and parents in Indonesia, particularly in underserved areas, so we offer an adoption program to assist them in maximizing their use of ICANDO. With these solutions, we hope that students can learn at their appropriate level, allowing for the success of remediation and reorientation programs in schools after the pandemic.

ICANDO was initially designed for young children aged two to six years. This year, in light of the loss of learning at the lower primary levels, we have expanded our target to include children ages 6 to 9. Thereby, we expect to ensure early learners' attainment of learning outcomes, particularly in foundational and durable skills, during post-pandemic remediation and reorientation programs. We hope that through ICANDO, we can bridge that gap between teachers' limited pedagogical competence and parents' limited time or resources to be more engaged in their children's learning. We believe that by implementing the aforementioned solutions, early learners in Indonesia can optimize their post-pandemic learning by being fully engaged in the process. Regardless of their condition, with or without internet access, we can mitigate their learning loss and help them catch up. Finally, we believe that we are en route to developing life-long learners who can face their own unpredictable future with great competences.

Syaiful Lokan is an educational practitioner with more than 20 years experience. In 2013, he began constructing schools in numerous places throughout Indonesia, including Pekanbaru, Rengat, Makassar, and Kupang. The underlying concept was quality education; delivering a superior education at an affordable price to students living in suburban/rural settings.

In establishing ICANDO, Syaiful partnered with Li Phin who is experienced with giving family seminars focusing on teaching parenting in schools and local organizations, as well as helping rural citizens improve their quality of life. The group increased its membership from 100 to 6,200 across Indonesia. For this reason, Li Phin is now the Chief of Marketing and Sales for ICANDO.

In terms of technology, Prisyandiaffif Charifa, our CTO, leads our development team. He graduated from New York University with a Master of Fine Arts in Game Design. Fandi has spent several years producing meaningful games with an emphasis on education. He now has a thorough understanding of the end-to-end game creation process, enabling game designers, artists, and programmers to interpret and implement the curriculum design.

Our team includes curriculum developers, game designers, artists, and programmers who are all experts in their disciplines and passionate about education. The team is accustomed to the Build-Measure-Learn scheme that we always strive to be better for the community we serve. We have cooperated with several schools to be our exemplary schools and some Indonesian universities to do research on the efficacy of our platforms. Therefore, we can ensure that our solution is community and data-driven.

We strongly believe in MIT Solve’s expertise in helping EdTech startups grow. With the great intention of growing our solution, we apply to the 2022 Global Challenge. Apart from the financial support, we would like to win other in-kind support such as access to mentorship and coaching, as well as gain more exposure to media and at conferences. As a new EdTech startup, ICANDO is committed to helping the Indonesian government to improve access and quality of education by providing game-based assessment for early learners. In order to do so, we are humbled to receive guidance and mentorship from the experts in MIT Solve. Therefore we can ensure our impacts in Indonesian education by equipping post-pandemic reorientation programs, developing teachers’ digital literacy, and improving the quality of life of under-resourced communities in Indonesia. Furthermore, we need more support in branding and building great networking with partners. Besides, we would value other in-kind support such as software licenses and legal services from Solve member and partner organizations.

ICANDO integrates game-based education into school ecosystems and completely supports it with cutting-edge technology, providing teachers, students, and parents with interconnected educational apps that can synergize children's learning, particularly during the post-pandemic recovery period. We employ game-based learning as a means of assessment because it has been proven to increase children's motivation, engagement, and, most importantly, foundational skills. Each game-based learning activity in ICANDO is carefully designed around the concept of discovery learning, in which children are presented with problems and given multiple options for solving them. Additionally, we provide quick feedback, voice recognition, and handwriting recognition, all of which are critical for children's early literacy and numeracy development. The technology provides immediate assessment results that can contribute to teachers’ professional judgment on personalized learning. 

Additionally, for regions without access to the internet, we provide the Smart Table and Village Platform, which allow local governments and their communities to act in the best interests of early learners' education and welfare. Additionally, we use NFT as a form of crowdfunding so that more people can get involved in our solution by funding and participating in school or village selection processes, for example. This way, more people will benefit from our solution in providing manageable assessment for under-resourced communities.

ICANDO aims at providing game-based assessment for early learners so they can be lifelong learners in the future. Within a year, we hope more schools or villages can be connected to ICANDO so more children who return to school this year can catch up their foundational skills and that more female teachers are able to support their families or are empowered as women. In our five-year vision, we expect to be able to alleviate learning loss in early learners after several years of remediation and reorientation processes.

We intend to establish new cooperation with around 250 schools in several cities and suburban areas throughout Indonesia over the next 12 months, for example in Jakarta, Bekasi, Padang, and Padang Pariaman. In rural areas, we anticipate that over 4000 (5% of total Indonesia’s underserved villages) will embrace Smart Tables and the Village Platform. We hope to complete over 1,500 additional mini games in ICANDO Kids in the coming months. By concentrating our efforts on the island of Java's 11 million early learners, we intend to succeed in strengthening their foundational and durable skills. 

We believe the aforementioned goals will be accomplished with our established cooperation with the schools, parents, governments, and the community. We have been cooperating with the Ministry of Education and teachers association for several years. Recently we have started cooperation with the Ministry of Village and Development of Disadvantaged Regions, and local municipalities. Last but not the least, we have activated community-based crowdfunding through NFT.

We track our progress toward our impact goals on a regular basis.

To begin, we count the number of schools and villages that have been registered and activated through each channel of cooperation. We ensure that each school or village can effectively use ICANDO. Considering the issue of digital literacy, we provide an adoption team that can assist teachers and village administrators while also monitoring their engagement.

Second, we track the number of teachers and village administrators who actually use the app to support children's learning by collecting data on the features they most frequently use. Likewise, we will be able to determine how teachers optimize their use of ICANDO for assessment in this manner.

Thirdly, we evaluate the recorded data to determine the effectiveness of our games when used as an assessment tool. When we track children's development in each game, we collect the following data: timestamps on when each child begins and ends the game, the outcome, the frequency of trials, and the duration of the game. We analyze the data to determine whether the child's performance has improved in their trials, either through improved results or a shorter time required to complete the game. For instance, if a student with ID No. 529xx played a particular game five times and received two stars on each trial, but the duration decreased significantly from 50 seconds to 18 seconds, we can conclude that the student improved in that particular skill.

ICANDO focuses on providing game-based assessment within an integrated ecosystem, such as a school or village community, in order to assist early learners in developing foundational skills in the process of remediation and reorientation programs and regaining learning loss.

We use game-based learning because it has been shown to improve motivation (Ryan and Rigby 2020), cognition (Mayer 2020), and affection (Ryan and Rigby 2020). (Loderer, Pekrun, and Plass 2020). Additionally, we recognize the critical role of parental involvement in the development of students' learning. As a result, we are actively engaged in the development of school ecosystems that include integrated apps for teachers, parents, and students. However, the same approach cannot be used in remote areas without access to the internet. This is why we developed Smart Table in collaboration with village administrators, family and welfare volunteers, parents, and children for use in the village. To assist in these efforts, we utilize NFT as a means of donation in addition to mobilizing more people to contribute to the improvement of Indonesian education.

When more schools and villages adopt ICANDO, we anticipate an increase in the number of children and early learners who use ICANDO as assessment materials. By doing so, we hope to increase teachers' knowledge about innovative learning and formative assessment, as well as their own digital literacy. On the other hand, we hope that more parents will become more involved in their children's education, assisting and motivating them to make up for their learning loss. As for the students, we expect them to be able to learn at their appropriate levels in order to improve their attainment of both foundational and durable skills.

Finally, our primary objective is to assist early learners in growing and developing as lifelong learners, so they can be the best versions of themselves, confidently facing the future. We hope that by empowering teachers, parents, students, and the village community, we can also improve their quality of life.

The core technology of ICANDO is designed to support offline-first technology and can be operated with low-end devices in order to serve our diverse market which is dominantly covered by an underserved community. For the same reason, we also develop “Smart Tables” for frontier regions of Indonesia with limited access to the internet. It is a table which is equipped with a tablet on each slide and can be used by up to 80 children.   

In terms of Cloud Computing, we use AWS S3  to support our up-to-date and dynamic content. Next, to provide lower size content, we also optimize our installer by using an APK file for Android and an IPA for iOS. Finally, to support integrated systems for students, teachers, and schools, we use AWS EC2 for multi-tenant and multi-layer architecture. Each data performance obtained from users will be stored locally and synchronized to the cloud regularly when internet connection is detected. Data can also be obtained manually when needed.   

As a game-based education app, ICANDO provides instant feedback for meaningful learning. To enhance children's experience in both spoken and written early literacy, we use Android-Speech-Recognizer for Voice Recognition and Google-ML-Kit for Handwritten Recognition. Both can still be used offline. Besides, we use Unity Engine which is known for its capability to develop animation, music, and intense interactivity for more engaging contents.

Finally, with our core technology and community support, we have been able to develop game-based learning activities in ICANDO rapidly.

We're also using blockchain technology to help promote great education across Indonesia in a more transparent way. It also gives everyone more ways to engage in the process. We have a larger goal for this technology to be completely incorporated into our product, but we're starting small by employing NFT (Non-Fungible Token) to raise funds for charity. We hope to establish a trusting relationship between donors and NFT developers as a result of this and to build a strong, dedicated community together. NFT will serve as both Proof of Charitable Contributions and an access code to our donor dashboard. Holding NFT also implies that any donor has the right to participate in DAO. More information about the project can be found here:

In ICANDO, we embrace diversity, value equity, and create an inclusive working environment. This can be seen from how the leaders run the company and how our products are designed. 

To begin with, our leadership team is composed of people who are excellent in their respective discipline coming from different gender, age, race, and religion. In our inclusive environment, each individual is free to practice their religion and embraces diverse viewpoints during brainstorming and discussion. As a result, everyone has the same opportunity to advance their career in ICANDO. 

Product wise, we always infused the theme of diversity and tolerance in our games which is in line with both the global and national curriculum and. In ICANDO Kids, we use “Tongkonan House” to visualize “home” in the app. Tongkonan itself means “sitting together” which is a value held by our ancestors to respect diversity and equity. Our non-playable characters are children created based on various criteria of various ethnicities in Indonesia. Those fictional characters will accompany children to play in ICANDO. Together they will solve problem-based games while celebrating diversities and developing tolerance.

Teachers, parents, and the community may collaborate with ICANDO to develop lifelong learners, even after the pandemic. Our integrated solutions, which include ICANDO Kids, ICANDO School, ICANDO Parents, Smart Table, and crowdfunding, are expected to address a variety of issues in the Indonesian education sector, including student underperformance, learning loss, teachers' insufficient pedagogical competence, parent disengagement, and a lack of internet connectivity.

Our products are available in both school (online) and village (offline) ecosystems (offline). Our mission was to serve Indonesia's early learners, beginning with nursery (3-4 years old), kindergarten (4-6 years old), and lower primary level (6-9 years old). To ensure that these young learners receive the best possible education, we also encourage young parents to become more involved in their children's learning, teachers to implement more innovative teaching methods, including assessment, and villages to provide accessible resources for these children to play and learn simultaneously. We reach these target customers through a variety of channels, including direct sales, resellers in each district, mass adoption through the district's education authorities, teacher associations, and digital marketing. Additionally, we have received recognition from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Village and Disadvantaged Region Development.

Our expenses are mostly made up of content production, research and development, human resources, taxes, and marketing. Apart from investment, our business model is divided into B2C and B2B segments. We provide $4.5 per month, $11 per three months, $11 per six months, and $25 per year to our B2C market. Concerning the B2B market, schools can begin with the beginner package and then upgrade to our B2B package, which costs US$3 each semester and $4.5 per year, through government student funding programs (US$ 21 for six-month period). Students' parents can upgrade this basic plan for US$10 per semester and $17 per year for each student account. Students can then utilize all of our features.

We constantly assess our progress in terms of both impact and revenue. We track numerous measures, including student growth, school growth, total DAU growth (students, parents, schools, and villages), student attainment improvement, teacher daily traction, and surplus. We anticipate that, with direct guidance from MIT Solve, we will be able to reach a broader audience and improve the quality of life in Indonesia by assuring high-quality education.

PT ICD Karya Indonesia was incorporated formally in 2018, with the mission of educating children throughout Indonesia using game-based education. We are a profit-oriented business that aims to build a sustainable business through product development and sales.

In our early stages, we relied on raising funding from local capital investors for the first two years of operation. We have received two significant funds from our primary investors and some capital from our company's founder and co-founder. 

At the second stage, around 2020 until 2021, we have recorded such a milestone in revenue through our products, i.e ICANDO Kids, ICANDO Schools, and ICANDO Parents. We create digital school ecosystems with these products through school canvassing, which we accomplished through signed agreements with teacher associations representing more than 480K teachers and collaboration with city district education authorities to collaborate on equipping teachers with digital skills. Apart from the school ecosystem, we construct a village ecosystem through the use of the "Smart Table," a table with four tablets on each side that may be used in any blind spot throughout Indonesia.

We anticipate a strong retention rate and financial sustainability through both school and village ecosystems. Thus far, our revenue has reached $32,000 in 2020 and $58.000 in 2021, with the possibility of increasing further due to our partnership with the aforementioned channels and a new relationship with a government entity such as the Ministry of Village and Development of Disadvantaged Regions. Our relationships, it appears, will increase our future sales and enable us to reach more under-resourced communities.

Until recently, we've relied on two distinct strategies to sustain our business. This has been accomplished through equity funding from two local angel investors. We received an initial round investment in the sum of $690.000 for equity in 2019. The following year, in 2020, another angel investor joined a shareholder, investing $690.000 in 2021 and an additional $345.000 in 2022. We have been approached by a Japanese venture capital firm for series A funding.

On the other hand, we began generating revenue in 2020. A cooperation with the government makes us a private partner of the Ministry of Education and Culture giving us credibility to sign agreements with teachers’ associations. As a result, we have served over 500 schools and more than 3,400 students within the last two years. With this in mind, we have secured sales of $32,000 in 2020 and $58,000 in 2021.