Accessible technologies for Special and Inclusive Education.

The shortage of educational technologies to address the special needs of all children and adolescents is a concern for low and middle-income countries. This has led to the high cost of specialized tools for learning, making it very difficult for parents and schools to access them. 

In addition, enough awareness has not been raised to help parents and teachers learn about the diverse needs of underserved learners and how to best accommodate them with the right technology. The recent studies reviewed suggest that many teachers lack experience with educational technology. One study in Nigeria found that teachers lacked experience with assistive technologies for students with a range of special needs.

Crystal believes that education is more fun when it's accessible and affordable. Hence, we will keep doing our best to develop accessible and affordable technologies that meet the unique needs of all uniquely abled children.

We design and develop a wide variety of accessible and affordable technologies that help school-age children and adolescents with special needs overcome diverse learning barriers. Our solutions range from tactile, game-based physical learning tools that can be used in rural and remote communities without electricity and internet, to offline-first mobile applications that can work on both the Android and iOS Operating systems. Our solutions are designed to personalize students' learning, improve learners' engagement with content, develop an interest in learning and improve learning outcomes.

Our products come with information and facts about special educational needs to help parents and teachers be aware of the needs of learners.

Our solutions are targeted at underserved school-age children and adolescents who struggle with learning and developmental issues, especially in low and middle-income countries. These underserved learners consist of half of the 65 million out-of-school children and the 474 million school-age children and adolescents in Africa who do not have internet access.
Our solutions work in rural and remote communities without resources such as electricity, internet access, or computers.

Growing up in the northern part of Nigeria has really opened our eyes to the various learning barriers children and adolescents face, which include: learning disorders, insecurity, the digital divide, poverty, etc. 

As an educator with years of experience teaching in an inclusive setting, I value any accessible tool that can help my students enjoy learning, improve self-confidence, and participate in the classroom.

Putting my team's combined experience of over 30 years of teaching and managing children of different needs and abilities together, we have been able to understand, to a large extent, how these learners learn and have been able to come up with creative, innovative tools and technologies that help these learners improve their development at their own pace and unlock their capabilities regardless of their needs.

With the help of MIT Solve, we can gain access to high-quality technical assistance and guidance as well as monetary support to scale up our products and services to meet the needs of new markets. It would also help us in the area of legal and regulatory matters.

There are certain factors that make our solution innovative and unique. They include;

1.  Tactile and Game-base learning tools: Research shows that tactile tools leverage the brain's haptic memory to solidify a particular concept during learning.
2. It works in rural and remote communities: Our solution works well in remote and rural communities in Nigeria and worldwide, where some of the most underserved children and adolescents live.
3. Accessible and Personalized: Our solutions are specially designed to be accessible and personalized to students with different needs and abilities. Hence, we align our solution with global accessibility guidelines such as the universal design for learning (UDL) and the inclusive design guidelines. enable and support personalized learning. 
4. Affordable: Our solutions are very affordable.
5. Game-based and Easy-to-use: Our solutions are designed to improve students' engagement with the content, hence, we strive to make them gamified, fun, and easy to use. So parents and teachers can be fully involved.
6. Offline-first: Our mobile applications are developed to work well offline, to support underserved learners who have little or no internet access.
7. Kids Safe and Healthy Content: We are committed to ensuring the online safety of children and adolescents, and so we design tools that help children and young adults stay safe online.

Our impact goal for next year is to scale up our products and services into new markets across and beyond Africa.

Our goal for the next five years is to become a global brand in the design and development of accessible and affordable technologies for the learning, development, and well-being of school-age children and adolescents with learning and development issues.

We plan to achieve our impact goals through consistency in delivering excellence, collaboration, and partnerships with others, and exploring every opportunity that comes our way. 

In order to measure the progress of our impact goals, we collect feedback from our clients and customers at weekly and monthly intervals. This feedback is mostly collected through our customer satisfaction feedback form, interviews, and observation.

We use the feedback we gather to iterate our solutions, ensuring that they align with the UN Sustainable goal to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning for all."

Crystal provides game-based, tactile, and multisensory educational technologies to help school-age children and adolescents in rural and urban communities with neurodevelopmental, cognitive, speech-language, communication, and social-emotional needs.
Our immediate goals are to improve students' personalized needs, improve learners' interest in learning, increase the level of learners' engagement with learning tools, and enable equal participation in education. 

These immediate goals are linked to our long-term goals, including improving learning outcomes, improving learners' self-confidence and participation in education, and increasing the availability and affordability of accessible educational technologies for parents and schools. To validate some of these links, we are currently testing our solutions on a small scale in Nigeria. Results show an increase in learners' interest in learning, self-confidence, and an increased level of engagement with learning tools.

The core technology that powers our solutions includes mobile applications, software, AI/ML, behavior design, paper, and 3D printing technology.

We are committed to incorporating diversity into the team and work by providing a room for every team member to express themselves and share their ideas. Our products align with the universal design for learning and inclusive design guidelines.

Crystal runs a multi-sided business model. We sell our physical products to parents and schools in rural and urban communities. The end-users and core beneficiaries are their children and/or adolescents, who struggle with learning. Through our digital products (mobile applications), we offer limited free content and an in-app purchase for full access.

Business Offering

Pricing:

$12.03 - $24.05 or 5,000 to 10, 000 Nigerian naira.

Marketing

We leverage social media ads to reach new customers.

Our plans for financial stability are through the sales of our physical and digital products. We also have plans to scale our solutions into new markets by next year to increase our revenue model.

We are currently testing and exploring new strategies for our solutions and are making progressive steps towards achieving financial stability.