guia.me by EL_H Labs

UNESCO estimates that globally countries need to recruit 69 million teachers by 2030 to meet the growing population of students worldwide, currently around 1.54 billion children and teenagers. Additionally, the World Bank estimates that in 2019 the ratio pupil-teachers worldwide is about 23:1 for elementary and 17:1 for secondary, being as high as 60:1 and 72:1 respectively. This disproportion affects particularly developing countries in African, South Asia and Latin America. In the United States, in schools where the majority of students were non-White, a larger percentage of teachers were White (NCES). Research shows that same-race teacher representation has a positive impact in low-performing cohorts, particularly Black and Latino students (ERIC). 

These figures demonstrate the scale of the disproportion between students and teachers which affects the quality of education specially for at-risk students (OECD). Personalized learning has been proposed as a possible improvement strategy by the US department of education. However, in under-resourced areas, where the student-teacher ratio is high, it is challenging to implement personalized learning: a teacher can manage one lesson plan but in a scenario where each student has a personalized lesson plan, the workload associated with planning, monitoring and evaluating learning is unmanageable. Additionally, not every school has access to digital personalized learning  platforms due to the cost or lack of access to the internet. Our students and teachers need alternatives to current pedagogical approached that meet them where they are and provide a link between the physical and digital education. Meet guia.me 

guia.me supports personalized learning through physical and digital board games for every child. Games and gamification has been an active area of research with preliminary results indicating that students are more motivated to learn through games (Habgood, 2011). Our solution generates physical and digital board games from generic lesson plans, at scale. 

The input is a generic lesson plan, possibly a government approved curriculum and converts it into a customizable board game. Teachers chose to print the board themselves, order a professionally printed version of the solution to be delivered to the school, and/or use the digital version depending on the level of resources and needs of the class. The physical version uses QR codes to enhance information and track student progress. The digital platform offers reporting and dashboards at the student and class level. 

In the proof of concept stage of the solution, we are focusing on selected templates ranging from simple Kanban Boards to visualize a student's work, to complex multi-player, multi-scenario games. Leveraging QR codes, the students can enhance the learning experience through links to content, hints, instructions, prompts, etc. Similarly, teachers can log student’s progress using QRs and a low-cost smartphone or tablet.

Our solution can be used by any teacher and student globally, but our focus is to provide low cost versions of the product to under-resourced communities. Our solution improves the daily lives of students by providing them with a platform to explore their interests following the teacher’s guidance. Teachers benefit daily by reducing the time tracking student’s work and facilitates the feedback exchange.

As shown above, our solution provides proactive notifications to the teacher on students progress, ranging from daily/weekly summaries to student-specific recommendations.

We are passionate about improving students' experience, supporting teachers, personalized education and technology applied to improve the daily lives of students and teachers. Our team is building our knowledge about our customers from interviews with our end-users, our personal experiences as educators, academic research and governmental education policy. Sonia Castro-Alarcon, as head of the science department in middle and high school in Colombia has interviewed teachers and staff, gathering invaluable qualitative research about the needs of students, specially hispanic and latino. We have gathered academic research on what can be done to improve learning in our target communities. And we are conducting user research (focus groups and surveys) to validate our ideas. Our technology platform is designed around the customer data and the interactions we observe. As we grow our customer base and reach a critical mass of customers and interactions, we will use our experience developing machine learning and advanced analytics solutions in retail and manufacturing and apply it to our problem.

On each country that we implement our solution, we plan on building a network of local content creators, graphic designers and developers to support teachers in the design, creation and implementation of  board games that fulfill the needs of the local communities. All the networks will be tightly connected facilitating knowledge sharing. 

Our solution addresses critical challenges of under-served communities in the US, particularly hispanic and native american students, since the power of personalized education can help to make relevant content for these communities. EL_H is committed to empower hispanic and native american communities to build content that resonates with their students in their language and within cultural context. 

The support from MIT Solve through mentorship and partnership on technology will be critical to develop the prototype and go to market in selected pilot markets. We plan to leverage the data from our user base to build statistical models to evaluate the success of boards pooling results from several boards and classes. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will be instrumental in scaling the solution as they can provide testing capabilities at scale. In the second phase of the project, support on the distribution network will be key for our growth as well as augmented reality capabilities. We invite you to partner with us to make personalized reality fun and accessible to every student in the world.

Currently personalized education is mainly focused on digital tools with great success. However, not every community has access to the internet. Additionally, teachers can’t spend a considerable portion of their time tracking progress, especially in regions with high student-to-teacher ratios. Our solution bridges the gap between purely digital and purely physical board games, empowering students and teachers to follow what works best for their specific realities without overburdening the teachers. 

Board games are a universal tool for learning and entertainment. Every culture has some version of games and that concept resonates with students across the world. Guiame aims to bridge traditional education with emerging technology.

Within one year we aim to engage with after-school programs to validate the approach and start building partnerships with education departments and platforms:

• Objective 1: Build a world-class board game generator that adapts to the specific needs of the communities that we serve

  • Key Result 1: We will deploy our prototype in 3 markets to cover three verticals (physical product only, digital product only and mixed experience)

  • Key Result 2: We will build a community of early adopters and contributors (local artist, educators, and story tellers) to and generate 3+ templates specific to the three pilot markets

• Objective 2: Improve students engagement, activity completion times and overall grade

  • Key Result 1: We will deploy 3+ board game templates with promoter scores of 4-5 average over the three pilot markets. 

  • Key Result 2: We will decrease average completion time of lesson plan by 30% with an improvement on average grades (numerical or categorical) 

• Objective 3: Build a world-class student progress tracker and game board generator able to integrate with major education platforms 

   Key Result 1: We will build a digital education platform focused on board game tracking to provide fast, reliable and easy to use tracking 

  Key Result 2: The time that teachers spend tracking student progress will be reduced to 10m/student while maintaining 100% coverage of all students. 
  

  Key Result 3: We will build APIs and other integration features to pilot integration with major education digital platforms. 

  
  

Within 5 years we aim to

• Objective 1: Build data architecture to collect data on student performance, teacher engagement to support future machine learning and augmented reality features, as cost-efficient as possible

  • Key Result 1: Refactor codes and databases from local machine to cloud service

  • Key Result 2: Record 100 features/signals per student/board combination including grades, attrition, and graduation rates.

• Objective 2: Build a community of active teachers and board creators

  • Key Result: Engage 100 teachers, 20 local storytellers and artists in a community sharing boards, know-how and experiences daily. 

• Objective 3: Build network of local distribution hubs, leveraging economies of scale to improve cost-efficiency

  • Key result: Pilot 5 local distribution hubs, leveraging local universities, schools and after-school NGOs to distribute the physical product reducing the cost by 10%

    (All the numerical targets are subjected to revision) 

Our solution contributes to the 4th UN Sustainable Goal: "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all"

Short term metrics:

• Number of teachers using templates. 
• Total number of students using the boards
• Average number of students per teacher using the board
• Satisfaction and promoter score (student and teacher surveys)
• Reduction in completion times and rates per lesson plan
• Production cost of physical and digital products

Long term metrics:

• Number of schools and districts using the products. 
• Average increase in grades from students using the tool vs control
• Average decrease in completion times 
• Increase in standardized score test, graduation rates and reduction attrition from students using the platform.

guia.me provides students with a personalized learning experience via a board game approach. We provide schools and districts with a technology based platform that converts lesson plans into board games to provide students with a personalized, student-centric lesson plan. Teachers build their lesson plans with the objectives and expected outcomes, guia.me builds a board game version of the plan, resulting in a flexible framework for the students with multiple options or journeys. 

Our immediate goals are a) to create a personalized learning journey for students, where the order of lessons is chosen based on the student's interests, performance in the previous lessons and learning/communication preferences and b) alleviate teacher’s overhead related to tracking students’ performance, identifying students who need help while promoting teamwork and self-directed learning. Our long-term outcome is to improve student engagement and performance, reducing teacher burnout and student attrition especially in vulnerable areas.  We will test the impact of the platform by measuring student satisfaction, learning rates and standardized test performance. We aim to measure not only academic but functional goals, with the ultimate goal of monitoring increased graduation rates and readiness to enter the workforce or college. To test some of those links, we plan to carry out field tests with students in selected regions to compare student satisfaction and engagement with and without our solution, as well as changes in standardized tests when students use our solution. Additionally, we plan to compare the time teachers spend in tracking, monitoring students before and after using our solutions.  

Our solution connects the physical and digital worlds to provide a complete personalized experience to students everywhere, specially in underserved communities. 

Phase 1

We use an app to facilitate the board creation process with  art, design and stories from local talent as well as computer generated designs (generative art) enhanced with QR codes to add additional content, hints, guidance and tracking capabilities.  We plan to engage with students and teacher via automated SMS, email notifications and digital dashboards and reports.. 

Phase 2:

We use augmented reality to enhance the student experience with the board. Additionally we will use AI, machine learning to provide robust analytics about performance of templates, build specific performance boards and provide recommendations to the teacher about student performance. 

Our solution serves every child worldwide and we specially focus on underserved communities. In the US we aim to build a solution for communities with high student-teacher ratio and minorities. guia.em serves as a hub for local talent to collaboratively build board games that resonates with the community, providing a voice to local artists, teachers and students to express their world views in their language and cultural context. 

As a company, EL_H labs is built around collaboration, innovation and development for all, in an environment where everyone can thrive and can bring their full selves to work. We plan to incorporate equity focus design to deliver solutions that bring personalized education to historically underrepresented and ignored communities.

We charge a fee at the school and district level for the physical and digital version of the board games that include access to templates, customizable board games, tracking and monitoring. The fee is flat below a threshold in the number of students (TBD) and after that it will be proportional to the number of students in the platform. 

We will use this revenue stream to subsidize physical and digital products for under-resourced communities. Additionally, we will seek partnerships with major education platforms (via licensing) and advertisers of education content and resources.  

We aim to build a diversified set of revenue streams that can adapt to specific characteristics of regions, schools, teachers and can change if external factors affect our target market:

• We sell yearly subscriptions to schools and districts. Under a threshold of number of students(to be determined), we will charge a flat fee for small schools and districts. And beyond the threshold, the fee will be proportional to the number of students. 
• We plan to build a platform that can integrate with major education platforms, and we will license our software and models. 
• Additionally, we will invite advertisers in the education space to promote content/tools to teachers.