Digital Educational Library in a Virtual Engaging Classroom

The education of millions of young learners has been disrupted by the pandemic and now the Russian war is displacing Ukraine refugee children. These children now face a mammoth learning slide in literacy and numeracy as well as the need to integrate into more English speaking classrooms and schools.  In order to help individual students, at-home learning will be a major driver of catching up. However, most parents either lack educational resources and books at home and are at a loss of what skills need to be reinforced at home or do have the technology and devices but no structured classroom environment (displaced refugees). Online connectivity is another type of major obstacle being faced by families preventing millions of learners from accessing educational materials and resources at home and/or school.

The solution, Digital Educational Library in a Virtual Engaging Classroom(DELVEC), integrates a digital library of exclusive educational content within an app that lets teachers create virtual classrooms and connect with their students to engage and guide them during at-home learning while also using the content in the classroom during instruction. This enables access for both in school and at home environments.

Smart Kidz Club's Classroom App consists of a digital library of educational content (books, flashcards, learning activities, quizzes, math activities) for young children Pre-K to Grade 5 delivered via a mobile app. All books read aloud in a real human voice.

Content: All content in the Smart Kidz Club library is leveled by ages, reading levels, grades by ATOS levels, and type of resource (audio only, audio visual, read along, flash cards, activity books). All content is original, exclusive, owned and deveoped by Smart Kidz Club. The leveling helps teachers and parents easily align the recommendations with each learner's individual level and interest. The library consists of 85% nonfiction content that is diverse, globally relevant and includes resources on early STEM concepts like physics, health and wellness, space and astronomy, health sciences, environmental sciences, social sciences. The Flash Cards build vocabulary, the learning activities and quizzes reinforce comprehension, and the Math section helps practice and master numeracy skills.

Smart Kidz Club's digital library is designed based on the science of learning and development with the objective of improving English literacy, numeracy, and social emotional learning. The read along technology, extensive and open book choice with several reading levels support a diverse range of learning pace and styles of students. The "just right" reading methodology followed by Smart Kidz Club is based on a 2018 study by Dr. John Hutton and uses the most effective condition of human narration with static pictures for all content without any harmful distractions or animations. All books in the digital library read along in a natural human voice offering the young learners a chance to hear and imbibe the correct pronunciations right from the start. This is particularly beneficial for non-native English speakers.  

Technology: The app has been designed with enterprise level mobile technology that works offline so as to be impactful in its reach and accessibility in remote areas with limited or no connectivity. The app allows creation of digital classrooms by the teacher and easy collaboration with the parents to guide students/children to read and learn with the knowledge-based educational library. 

The solution works with smartphones or tablets without the need for continuous streaming of the internet thereby bridging the digital divide. This solution, if scaled, will help Pre-K to Grade 5 students to continue learning from home, cope with learning losses, acquire strong English reading, word building, comprehension, and numeracy skills. With the offline access of Smart Kidz Club, every child has the potential to access high quality education.

The DELVEC solution via the Classroom App has also incorporated the power to engage learners with a game-based engagement module that empowers teachers to encourage, challenge, guide, monitor, and evaluate each student's progress.

There is a clear correlation between English proficiency and economic competitiveness. English is called the “basic skill” for success in the 21st century. 

The DELVEC solution serves all students under the age of 12 years in pre-primary, primary or elementary schools and their teachers. It helps students acquire foundational English literacy and numeracy skills, reinforcement and learning from home, to better cope with learning losses. It empowers teachers to be actively engaged and direct their students' learning at home despite school disruptions and slides due to the school closures. It enables parents to get an easy at-home learning tool that will help them stay on top of, involved, and informed about their child's at-home learning and progress. The solution works with smartphones or tablets without the need for continuous streaming of the internet thereby maximizing reach and bridging the digital divide.

The solution helps teachers and parents to overcome the learning loss and slides due to COVID and get students easily integrated back into the classroom at the desired grade level. This solution can also help children displaced by war or in out-of-school settings where teachers can keep their students virtually engaged using mobile phones and devices.

Surinder sharma, CEO, has collaborated with local and international non-profits, education departments and ministries of education to enable access for children in rural or remote areas. In 2020, Smart Kidz Club's nationwide access to Namibia Reads app was recognized by UNESCO as Namibia's COVID-19 Education Response National Learning Platform and Tool. Surinder has been selected to present Smart Kidz Club solutions at various international conferences that include mEducation Alliance's Global Education Innovation Symposia. Most recently, she successfully negotiated and entered into a five-year collaboration agreement with NFL Alumni Association to promote reading and learning among young children in America. Surinder works closely with teachers, early education researchers, business partners, nonprofits, ministries to help maximize and promote reading and learning among young children.

In addition, Smart Kidz Club collaborates with local partners/businesses in select countries to work on large scale social impact projects with the government or ministries of education.

We are applying to SOLVE to help scale our DELVEC solution (Classroom App) to underserved populations by way of partnerships—with local and state governments for buy-in and permissions, with businesses who will become our implementation partners, and nonprofits and foundations with similar missions for funding and community outreach. 

We are particularly looking at South Africa where our local partner is working on a large scale social impact project for rural populations.

Smart Kidz Club's DELVEC solution is unique in three distinct ways:

1. Its ability to work offline without the need for continuous streaming of the internet: This increases accessibility in remote or in low- and no-internet settings. The app can be updated whenever there is availability of free Wifi. Additionally, this helps keep young children safe from inappropriate online content, cyberbullying, unhealthy marketing, and other online dangers.

 2. Its ability to connect teachers, parents and students with an easy access mobile app that can be downloaded on smartphones and tablets: This enables the input of two most important stakeholders in a child's learning and education outcomes—teacher and parent. This also helps parents stay engaged and involved in their child's learning at home.

3. Access to Smart Kidz Club's UNIQUE LIBRARY of high-quality US-based digital educational content (85% nonfiction) developed and owned by Smart Kidz Club—includes Teacher Guide, different types of resources like flashcards, quizzes, learning activities, read along, audio only books. The app has been designed based on education researchers' paper titled — Putting Education in 'Educational' Apps: Lessons From the Science of Learning with a focus on maximizing education of young children. It also follows an important 2018 study by Dr. Hutton on the harmful effects of animations and cartoons on young children learning to read. ALL CONTENT IS OWNED BY SMART KIDZ CLUB offering us the flexibility with business models for various settings. In addition, Smart Kidz Club is open to working with local schools and teachers to add local content. 

Most other solutions have one of the three components. Our Classroom solution enables any individual/teacher to set up a personalized teaching community in a variety of settings—school, early play centers, tutoring, out- of-school learning communities, refugee camps or other scenarios where a regular school is not an option. The teacher uses the App on her tablet or smartphone to connect to her students remotely and virtually with the app to guide and help continue at-home learning and teaching. 

The engagement module with rewards, badges and leaderboards offers additional motivation and encouragement for the students to engage in learning. 

The human-narration enables English language development and correct English pronunciations right from childhood.

Impact goals for the next 1 year:

1. Identify, onboard and train teachers & trainers (reading champions) on how to download and get the most benefit out of the app. 

2. Help teachers/trainers align their curriculum and lesson plans with the Smart Kidz Club's library.

3. Provide tablets to the teachers/trainers preloaded with the App.

Impact goals for the next 5 years:

1. Help teachers/trainers actively use the digital library with their students in class.

2. Train the teachers on how to use the tools in the app to motivate the students to read and learn more.

3. Scale the solution to more classrooms.

4. Procure devices for each student for additional reading and learning at home.

5. Test and assess the improvements in reading outcomes of the students.

The main KPIs used by our company for measuring progress in are:

1. Daily Active Users (DAU)

2. Monthly Active Users (MAU)

3. Ratio of DAU/MAU

4. Daily User Engagement (DUE) 

5. Reading times of the students (tracked within the app)

6. Level of the books they are reading (tracked within the app)

In addition, the most reliable measures are the reading and literacy assessments conducted by the teachers/trainers in the classroom.

It is estimated that more than 250 million school children throughout the world cannot read.(1) This is unfortunate because literacy has enormous benefits – both for the individual and society. Higher literacy rates are associated with healthier populations, less crime, greater economic growth, and higher employment rates. Worldwide, over half of the 1.5B secondary language learners are English Language Learners. English language proficiency is a determining factor for social mobility & learning opportunities that many students fail to reach. 

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has created severe disruption to global education systems, by forcing more than 1.6 billion learners in over 190 countries out of school at the peak of the crisis.(2) School closures lead to more school dropouts, leave learners at a higher risk of abuse, loss of confidence and self-esteem, and contribute to a decline in quality teaching and learning. While the result has been a scramble to online learning and the use of assorted EdTech tools to prevent disruptions in learning, the biggest challenge has been the lack of equitable access to internet or online connectivity. COVID-19 and the need for remote learning have thrown a glaring spotlight on the digital divide—the fact that internet and mobile network access varies greatly in low- and middle-income countries. 

 In addition, teachers have been burdened with having to adopt and use new, often complicated technologies, having to reinvent lesson plans and relying on teaching and learning approaches that do not work well. They may face a complex learning curve with these unfamiliar education technologies, without having a chance to evaluate their effectiveness in remote education settings.

 Smart Kidz Club DELVEC Solution (Classroom App) offers to bridge this digital divide and make it easy for parents to access teacher-guided high quality "just-right"(3) English books and Math activities at home, help parents bond with their kids by reading-along together, help English Language Learners learn the correct pronunciations, expose kids to new words, improve the English reading & literacy skills, help struggling readers, and bridge the growing divide between the high and low performers and building a strong foundation for global academic advantage.

Smart Kidz Club Classroom Solution is delivered via mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms. The apps, developed and owned by Smart Kidz Club, which are already proven to work in 100 countries around the world, are continuously evolving with addition of new features, new content types, and integration of innovative technology built on Native iOS & Android platforms. Smart Kidz Club's content presentation is proprietary and designed and developed with a goal of being appealing for children to attract and engage them in reading. We use Google cloud infrastructure to scale on a mass level with auto scaling policies in place as well as automation of tasks for user engagement. In the future, we plan to integrate AI to further scale user engagement.

Our team is a group of balanced and diverse passionate individuals with complementary strengths & experiences. We work with partners, authors, illustrators, editors, organizations from around the world and ensure that we are inclusive and diverse in both our content as well as personnel who work with us.

I am a woman CEO & founder who has 20+ years of experience in publishing/IT. I am passionate about reading & inspired by the shift toward digital content consumption, lack of reading engagement by kids, & power of digital technology, I used my experience & strengths in creativity, ideation, and strategy to start Smart Kidz Club. 

Harjeet Singh, CTO has 24+ years of experience in forming new businesses & helping them scale with the use of cutting-edge technology. He has developed several mobile apps/software solutions for major publishers & corporations. He currently works in the space of building new Automated Intelligent Systems. 

Rajeev Karpe, President, Asia Pacific is a seasoned business development professional with 35+ years of experience working with Global MNCs. He is an expert in the Asia Pacific Market & responsible for partnerships, sales & channel management & organization development. He was the director of Asia Pacific strategy for the largest hydrocolloids company in that region.

Neelam Singh, Legal/CS is a practicing attorney in New York & New Jersey for 12+ years with extensive business law experience relating to contract, intellectual property, employment, labor, entertainment, corporate governance, consumer, marketing/advertising, regulatory & antitrust law.

We have a highly distinguished and diverse board of advisors that bring valuable experience from each of their fields of expertise. 

 Take a look at our team here.

Our main business models are:

B2C Consumer Apps: Our B2C model offers direct subscriptions to our apps globally on Google and Apple App Stores. 

B2B & B2G DELVEC Solution: For our DELVEC solution we sign up distributors in various countries to market the solution in schools. We also work directly with nonprofits and government agencies to sponsor/fund nationwide access in their country or region.

In this case our beneficiary segments will be rural schools that will not have the ability to afford the solution. Our distributor will work with the government and nonprofits or foundations to pilot the DELVEC solution in some rural schools for impact. Once we study the impact we can reach out to the government or foundations for scaling the solution into other rural schools in the regions.

The Classroom App will be sold to the Early Childhood centers/schools at a yearly subscription. The local partners will source the per student license at a discounted rate from Smart Kidz Club and sell these to the ECCEs/schools. This will ensure financial sustainability for the local partner as well as Smart Kidz Club. The local partner will have the flexibility to determine the product pricing and offer volume discounts based on the contracts with the government or Ministry of Education. The recurring revenue stream each year will help keep the solution financially viable and sustainable. 

Rural schools that are unable to afford the solution will be sponsored by local givernment, grants or subsidies. Our local partner will apply for grants or sponsorships from local foundations. We will also work with international nonprofits to subsidize the solution. 

Namibia Reads App—a nationwide literacy initiative of our B2C app launched in Namibia in 2020, was sponsored by a US nonprofit. It is currently being studied for its effective literacy and educational outcomes in select primary schools  by University of Delaware and the Namibia Ministry of Education Arts and Culture. Once the research paper is published, we plan to scale it to other countries or regions by seeking grants/funding from nonprofits or governments.

Smart Kidz Club's B2C Apps are teacher approved by Google Playstore and available around the world on iOS and Android platforms, having received great reviews and testimonials by parents. They are available for purchase through the app stores with a subscription model. We continue to work on increasing the revenue share of our apps in different markets around the world.

Our DELVEC Solution (Classroom App), purchased and currently being used in Nigeria by a private school, in Malaysia by a tutoring center, in Japan by a preschool chain. We continue to establish new partnerships in select countries to grow the Classroom App.