Make

Right now, six hundred million children between 8-13 on the African continent do not have access to quality education; where they are engaged with what they are learning and equipped with the right skills for the careers of tomorrow. This problem has only been made worse with the pandemic. Learning content that was meant to be taught in a classroom has just been thrown online without any consideration for the user experience. As a result, children feel disconnected because they cannot interact with their friends and because they are not engaged with the content. Moreover, the current solutions available are not suitable for the average African household because of the high price point and the content not localized for their context.

At Katapult, we are re-imagining learning and preparing youths for the careers of tomorrow in Africa. We are a platform that hosts gamified educational experiences in the form of experiential units created by us or third parties. The units can be consumed as individual units or as a whole experience. The units each have skills attached to them that can be tracked on a dashboard. 

We provide a meaningful solution based on 3 things: 

• Mastery of skills through game-based learning

Our platform changes the way kids learn through game-based learning. Through the platform, they develop technical and soft skills through immersive learning experiences and repeat and individualized challenges based on aptitudes and interest.

• Accessibility: in terms of pricing, the way children learn, and localisation of curriculum

• Community: on our platform, children have access to a pan-african network where they can showcase their projects and get inspired from each other

Make for kids

Our user is anyone between 8-13 years old who is able to access our platform through a smartphone, tablet or desktop. They will be interacting with the platform through an avatar of their own, navigating challenges and problem sets. Through this platform, they will be engaged in their learning, learn at their own pace and build meaningful skills.

Make for schools

This will be through multi-year partnerships with schools, bootcamps, after school clubs, and NGOs. Partners will be able to use our platform and gain full access to the product through a competitive subscription fee. They will be able to access the classroom management, and skills assessment feature.

Make for parents

Parents are able to access the analytics of their children's profile to monitor their progress and skills level as well as all the activities that their children go through on the platform. They are able to do so without interfering with the learning pathways.

Together, our team has a unique combination of 23 years of experience:

• developed mobile games for an African audience at Grey Parrot

• designed physical and digital products with a strong focus on user experience at Katapult

• lead the strategy and growth of Edtech startups like ALU and Moringa School

• deployed both scalable tech infrastructure and software at cost

Since January 2019, we have been conducting user research through workshops about coding and robotics with a focus on soft skills. We have gathered extensive information about our customer demographic and needs. This offline model has allowed us to get a sense of what our users like and more insights on the target demographic we are catering for.

Our belief in African youth and unwavering drive and passion for Africa is seen through our work experience at the African Leadership University, Moringa School, Grey Parrot and Katapult.

• Partnerships

We want to scale our impact through multi-year partnerships with schools, bootcamps, after school clubs, and NGOs. Partners will be able to use our platform and gain full access to the product through a competitive subscription fee. They will be able to access the classroom management, and skills assessment feature. 

• Recognition

Through the challenge, we wish to gain international exposure through different media channels.

• Network and Strategic direction

We understand that we cannot solve this problem alone. Solve’s network is packed with people with extensive knowledge in education systems and technology. We wish to tap into this knowledge base. Along with the knowledge, we believe that this network of experts can provide us with strategic direction to better and more sustainably scale our solution. 

Traditional methods of digital learning still largely rely on pedagogical approaches that were designed for physical learning. Our solution reimagines how teaching and learning is done by employing gamification and learning analytics to optimize for engagement and knowledge retention. Making our solution available on all digital platforms means we are more accessible in our target markets which have a much higher uptake in mobile devices which are projectected to hit penetration of 50% by 2025.

Next year:

1. Work with schools and bootcamps who enroll students from limited income backgrounds

   1. Partnership with telco companies in order to support with increased data access

   2. Partnership with NGOs working with children from limited income backgrounds 

2. Higher academic achievement across schools

   1. Through highly personalized and customised learner pathways 

   2. We will be rolling out our platform in English, French, Swahili, Arabic, Hausa and other languages that are most widely spoken in our chosen cities for expansion 

   3. Through our superior pedagogy, students will be able to retain more information and apply concepts across a range of problems 

3. Creating more jobs in the game development industry

   1. Given the nature of Katapult, we are committed to hiring talent from the continent in order to build the next iterations of our platform 

   2. Through our hiring process, we will select top talent while respecting the talent and opinions of everyone 

   3. Our commitment is to maintain 50% women into our team by hiring and training talent (as from entry level)

   4. We plan on launching a technical apprenticeship program that will allow young graduates and professionals to do work at Katapult while gaining experience and building their portfolio

Next five years:

1. More girls going into STEM subjects 

   1. We would like to provide specialized pricing for schools that have STEM subjects and an equal representation of gender

   2. We will be launching a mentorship service through our platform where girls will be paired with field and subject experts to the their accountability partner and act as coach in order to help them solve the challenges that they are facing 

2. Higher academic achievement across schools

   1. Through highly personalized and customised learner pathways 

   2. We will be rolling out our platform in English, French, Swahili, Arabic, Hausa and other languages that are most widely spoken in our chosen cities for expansion 

   3. Through our superior pedagogy, students will be able to retain more information and apply concepts across a range of problems 

3. Be present in more emerging markets working with students with limited income

   1. Through grants and government funding, we will be offering access to our platform for free to students from limited income background 

   2. We will work with public schools and NGOs

4. Lead the change in behavior and equip more parents to support their children’s learning 

   1. For our parents portal, we will share with every parent the journey that their children will go through, what they will be learning and the type of access they will have 

   2. Based on the above, parents can choose and set up controls on the platform

   3. After every experiential unit, each parent will receive a report on the skills building results of their kids 

   4. Parents will be able to contribute to and collaborate with their children’s games and projects 

   5. Parents will be sent customized blog resources, articles, prompts and activities that they can do with their children

5. Creation of more schools and bootcamps to teach coding and other tech relevant skills

   1. We want to help create more and more boot camps across the continent through the offline model. Even though this will not be part of our strategy, we hope to play a catalyst role in this set. 

In order to measure our progress, we have currently implemented a sign in process in our prototype in order to collect information such as age, gender and name. We plan on expanding on that in order to collect information like school attended (name of institution, private or public school), interest in subjects, and career aspiration. When it comes to the parents portal for our next iteration of the solution, we plan on capturing information like their profession, monthly income, subscriptions that they have and how many children they have with their respective ages. We will also be creating an educator portal in the next iteration where we will be capturing information like the total number of students they serve, the type of school they are, technologies they use in order to deliver their learning (where applicable) and number of students into STEM subjects. 

Through the data collected above and our user information system, we will be able to track the journey of every single student. Additionally, we value the importance of community and through the different hackathons and offline events, we plan on bringing together our users so they are able to stay connected and engage with our team. Through these efforts, we will be able to measure our impact and hear more stories from our users itself. 

We believe in a world where no youth is left behind in the shifting world economy. But right now, the reality is 600 million children in Africa don’t have access to quality education where they are engaged with what they are learning and prepared for the careers of tomorrow. The root cause we are trying to change is that there are no adequate education programmes or tools that provide youth with the skills to operate in this economy. What we do through our digital platform is engage learners with game-based learning and teach them meaningful soft skills like critical and creative thinking and technical skills like programming and math by solving different challenges. 

Our flagship product, Make, uses concepts in gamification and technologies traditionally associated with game development to build engaging learning experiences. By breaking out of the very rigid mould that most EdTech solutions use today, we essentially create a new 3-dimensional canvas on which we, and third party learning experience builders can create highly interactive content.

At the core of Make is a platform that is built on the Unity game engine. This allows us to be versatile in our multi-platform reach as well as forms which our learning experiences take. Make provides a unified set of APIs which our learning experience builders can leverage to understand our users learning style and pace and a number of metrics that are continuously being tracked and updated in order to craft custom learning pathways for each user. It also exposes gamified elements such as a leaderboards, skill trees, badges and rewards which increase engagement and allows for more of the content to be retained.

Building of the platform - ever since our existence in 2019, we have worked with students from a diverse economic background and have conducted a pilot with children on the autism spectrum. This has allowed us to have more empathy and deep understanding of our users, how they think, the existing knowledge they have and the support they receive from their educational systems. We have deliberately included some of these learnings in our prototype. We will continue to embed these learnings in our next iteration of the solution. 

Choice of partners - we will work with like minded and mission aligned organizations that speak to the value of Katapult. We want to remain accessible to all members of the community. We will work with partners who support the advancement of the youth regardless of their background.

Hiring of talent - we pride ourselves on our ethnicities and gender in the team. Our one of its kind hiring process allows us to attract top talent and evaluate them based on their merits. Our unique performance management system, places a lot of value on the unique contribution of individuals and gives space for our team members to feel respected for their opinions. 

The way through which our customers are able to access our services is through a subscription model. Our beneficiaries are able to select the challenges that they are most interested in and through our personalized learning methodology, we are able to adjust the difficulty of the challenges based on their aptitudes. Once our beneficiaries are on the platform, they are able to choose from a suite of games. The subscription model allows them to gain unlimited access and through the in-app purchase options, they are able to get more characteristics in order to enhance their character’s abilities. 

For educators and parents, we also provide technical and soft skills reporting. Through this, they are able to understand the progress of their beneficiaries, track their activities and are able to provide any support that they require. We also hope to expand the services on the platform in order to build more assessment functionalities for the educators. For educators, there will be competitive but affordable subscription fees (as base) and option for them to pay for additional services based on the students they serve and the goals of their curriculum. 

We understand that we are on a bold mission and it is not an easy one. We continue to require support in order to create the impact that we want to see in the world. So far we have received a total of $41, 000 from Total, Acceleration program with Turbine, Acceleration program with Yher and Mauritius Research Innovation Council combined. We are in the process of applying for grants with other organizations like MIT and MasterCard Foundation in order to catalyze the product building phase. We are in the pre-seed stage and are looking to raise $615, 000 in order to invest in product development and geographic expansion. Our strategy is to focus on high engagement and high retention throughout the platform with as many downloads as possible in order to drive conversion of paid customers. We therefore hope to start collecting revenue as of late 2023. We hope to hit about $10M in revenue in the next five years while initially using venture capital funding in order to remain financially viable. 

We understand that we are on a bold mission and it is not an easy one. We continue to require support in order to create the impact that we want to see in the world. So far we have received a total of $41, 000 from Total, Acceleration program with Turbine, Acceleration program with Yher and Mauritius Research Innovation Council combined. We are in the process of applying for grants with other organizations like MIT and MasterCard Foundation in order to catalyze the product building phase. We are in the pre-seed stage and are looking to raise $615, 000 in order to invest in product development and geographic expansion. Our strategy is to focus on high engagement and high retention throughout the platform with as many downloads as possible in order to drive conversion of paid customers. We therefore hope to start collecting revenue as of late 2023. We hope to hit about $10M in revenue in the next five years while initially using venture capital funding in order to remain financially viable.