LearnOSTEAM

Future of work requires a new kind of educational model that is based on soft skills like communication, creativity, problem solving and hard skills like coding, robotics, AI, and STEAM based education.

 More than 20 million students are enrolled in Pakistani primary and high schools. According to UNICEF India,  250 million children are studying in schools. However, due to lack of resources such students are not having the hardware to experiment and learn. Millions of kids in each of the developing countries are facing a similar problem.  Thus, by spreading the STEAM education using the power of software, our solution can impact more than 300 million students across the globe. 

 Dearth of the trained teachers for the STEAM education is a major factor contributing to the problem that our solution will try to tackle. There are no teachers available for a STEAM based hands on educational approach and this is one of the biggest challenges.

According to UNICEF report “The State of the World’s Children 2021”, 24 percent of 15- to 24-year- olds in developed countries like France, Germany and USA are reporting often feeling depressed or having little interest in doing things. In less developed countries such as Cameron this percentage of low interest goes up to 32%. This lack of interest by our youth is creating mental health problems as well.

A World Economic Study found that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don't yet exist. This is a huge problem as by getting conventional training our children will not be able to handle the future jobs. Future of work requires a new kind of educational model that is based on soft skills like communication, creativity, problem solving and hard skills like coding, robotics, AI, and STEAM based education.

LearnOSTEAM is an eLearning platform for hands-on STEAM education. It enables schools to deploy STEAM based lessons at the click of a button.  Students get access to 300 lessons for grades 1 to 8 while existing teachers get access to lesson plans, solutions, guides and STEAM certifications as well. Meanwhile principals or school administrators get detailed analytics enabling them to see how their school is performing in terms of learning.

 Our platform enables schools to prepare students with skills like Coding, Robotics, Electronics, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, 3D Modeling, Game Design, Web development as well as Digital Media tools. Additionally it helps drive more engagement in learning and helps them increase their enrollments by up  to 10% which is a great proposition for schools. Each lesson consists of a hands on part where students follow instructions to perform an activity in the lesson. 

 Each lesson in LearnOSTEAM is based around three components, learning content, hands on component and an assessment. The learning content is based around our philosophy of playful learning which includes different levels and challenges which a student solves in order to move forward.  The student follows textual and visual instructions in each level and performs the lesson. The lesson is about solving different kinds of challenges. For example, in Robotics, the students start by learning how to code a robot to move in straight lines, make turns and eventually learn about sensors and actuators. They then solve challenges like trying to find water on the surface of mars using different sensors. All this is achieved in a simulated environment. Similarly they also learn how to wire up the different components of a robot in the electronics simulator, learning concepts of electronics. This interdisciplinary approach is followed throughout our curriculum and different domains. For instance in coding the students start off with basic conceptual learning about variables, loops and conditions using visual coding and then move onto complex languages like Python and JavaScript. All those lessons are also based around interdisciplinary challenges like drawing different shapes in Python and using JavaScript to create colorful patterns that could be used as digital art. 

We are also building AI based models that assess the learning of the student’s concepts and provide personalized content and learning. By identifying different features of how a student goes about each lesson, LearnOSTEAM changes the content difficulty enabling effective learning. 

Moreover we have also designed a hardware educational robotics kit that helps in learning with the platform. Only costing $150, it has a modular design that can be used in different domains instead of just Robotics. 

Our solution can improve the educational capabilities of more than 300 million students around the globe. Problem of lack of STEAM trainers will be solved by our solution. 

The PI of this proposal is a teacher who used to teach computer science to undergraduate freshmen at a national level university in Pakistan. The student body at this university comes from very diverse backgrounds. There are students from urban as well as rural and remote areas many of whom are supported by national scholarships. One of the biggest problems while teaching a basic coding subject was to have a uniform learning environment in the classroom. The reason being, that students from urban areas had a lot of prior exposure to digital technologies and tools whereas students from rural and remote areas had very little or no exposure. It was found that having prior exposure to technologies was a great advantage whereas students with no exposure had a lot of difficulty in catching up with other students. Although in terms of conceptual understanding and problem solving both bodies of students were equally capable. This is where the idea was formed of creating a platform where students everywhere could be given access to technologies and digital tools relevant to current and future careers. This is where the PI discussed this idea with a former student of his who, it so happens, always wanted to create a social enterprise. Both of them joined hands and started LearnOBots in 2014.

Initially the biggest challenge was to create a sustainable model where this enterprise could survive in the long run and eventually achieve its goal of making learning accessible for children of all socio-economic backgrounds. In the beginning we started by targeting private schools and parents that had stronger buying power. That helped us to sustain, grow and re-invest in the business. Our biggest problem at this stage was how to make our fun hands-on workshops and activities affordable and accessible at a large scale. At that time our model was more of an offline model where we hired engineers and trained them as STEAM trainers who would then conduct our workshops. However this model was expensive and hard to scale. As we worked with more and more schools, parents, teachers and children we started identifying a number of issues that all stakeholders faced limiting their access to our workshops. These problems included high cost of hardware, lack of interest by teachers due to their existing workloads and limited accessibility. It was clear that our workshops were extremely useful and in demand, however most people couldn’t afford it and most schools did not want to invest a lot of finances in this new model. Once we had a very good idea of the limiting factors and problems faced by all stakeholders we started working on a new product that would be scalable, affordable, equally effective and would be able to solve the problems faced by School administrators, teachers, parents as well as children.

As we developed our new product we were also selected by SPRING accelerator (www.springaccelerator.org) which is an accelerator focused on girls education. As part of the program we created our theory of change, conducted market research by interviewing school administrators, school teachers and children trying to understand their perspective. Based on this input and research we have developed features in LearnOSTEAM to ensure that its adaption doesn’t have major issues and it has a product market fit.    

As we’ve launched our product we have received a very good response from schools, teachers and students. One of the teachers has been very actively sharing her class’s progress as well (https://twitter.com/hamnah_ibrahim/status/1468631512354631689?s=21&t=Hy8ocJPRASrfEQ7GitaxzQ). Now we believe our platform is very much on the way of democratizing STEAM based education through LearnOSTEAM and getting on board with a partner like MIT solve will help us expand our reach to more regions in Pakistan and outside.

Solve has a great network that we intend to utilize. As we've launched our platform and continually develop it, we're always looking for experienced people for our board as well as people who can help us launch in different regions. Currently we have created partnerships in Saudi Arabia and UAE, however we're interested in networking with people and companies who have worked in African and Asian regions where we can create a larger impact. 

We have been working in the EdTech domain for over 8 years specifically using the STEAM approach. Our experience of working with schools, parents and children over the past many years has enabled us to focus on understanding the challenges of the education sector and its future. Our knowledge and experience gives as an edge over all other solutions and teams giving us important insights on how to ensure the maximum impact of our solution. Having been through multiple accelerators and training programs we have been able to create solutions that are effective and create a positive impact for children. 

During our pilots we have already seen how the solution has impacted learning in children specifically girls. There have been girls and boys who have had such an impact that they've even changed what they want to be when they grow up, basing their decisions on their interests rather than on the influence of their parents or households. So our solution basically inspires children to explore different domains and then identify their passions and follow careers that they not only love but can help them in their future careers. 

Over the past 8 years of our operation we have trained around 25000 students. The reason for this number was the non-scalability of our older approach. However with our new platform LearnOSTEAM our goal is to have 1 million students on our platform in the next 5 years. Having re-launched our platform last year post COVID, we already have more than 3000 children use our platform in a few months and it is growing as we expand our reach. 

However our main goal is to have an impact by making STEAM education accessible, affordable and fun enabling students to have exposure to different domains and then learning the skills that they are not only passionate about but also contribute to their own well being as well as find skill based earning opportunities. 

One of the main indicator that we're using to measure our impact us UN SDG#4 Quality education. By ensuring accessibility and affordability of our platform we're ensuring that everyone has access to quality education that can not only help in their well being but also provide earning opportunities. For example on our platform children can learn skills like coding, web design and development and coding languages like Python, JavaScript, HTML and CSS which will help them find freelance work. 

As part of our participation in SPRING accelerator we defined our theory of change specific to girls which included

• Girls skills and confidence allow them to get better jobs in future and demonstrate leadership
• Girls pursue further education and careers in STEM or IT fields
• Girls perform better in Science exams
• Parents and society start to see girls as: Innovators, makers, capable of more, equal to boys (changing social norm)

The complete report on the pilot we ran with SPRING is available here. 

The impact is also relevant to children from low income socio-economic backgrounds as well. So our overall theory of change includes creating an impact where

• Children are able to access quality education through our platform that is relevant to future careers
• Children are able to learn skills that can land them freelancing gigs helping them earn
• Children are able to learn skills of the future ensuring they're able to land skills based jobs
• Children are able to identify and follow their passions instead of just following a career path that they're not really interested in.

Our solution is a web based cloud hosted solution that includes a number of different simulators and frameworks. As our core proposition is to have a comprehensive coverage of domains ensuring children are able to access lessons in interdisciplinary STEAM domains we have developed a platform that easily integrates with other frameworks. 

We have designed and developed our Simulators using 3D and 2D physics and graphical engines. For example our Robotics simulator has been designed in Unity and our Electronics simulator has been designed in Phaser. Moreover using these engines has enabled us to create a more game like experience in our lessons focusing on our playful learning approach. Furthermore we also have a robotics hardware kit has also been designed to be programmed with our platform. It has been designed to have a modular design, ensuring that one single hardware kit can be used to learn different domains. 

Here are some pictures of our hardware prototype. 

At LearnOBots we are very much focussed on having a diverse team. Over the years we have had a 50% ratio of men and women working at LearnOBots. Currently we have a woman team lead as well that is leading our trainings and content creation department. This department has been mostly led by women in our team. We encourage people from all socio-economic backgrounds in our team irrespective of their color, religion or background.

Our business model has both B2B and B2C customers. For B2B we target schools and for B2C we work with parents and children. 

1. B2B Model

For our B2B model we provide LearnOSTEAM to a school where the whole school signs up. For a cost that varies between $1 to $4 based on number of students enrolled, we have a monthly subscription that the school pays us. One of the advantages that schools find is that by introducing our program they are able to improve their enrolment numbers. Moreover it helps these schools stand apart from their local competition. These are generally private schools. Once a school signs up, we have an onboarding process through which we take the school through. It includes, understanding the infrastructure of the school and suggesting any improvements, identifying the skill level of the teachers as well as the students based on which we modify our content offerings and then training the teachers as facilitators. In most cases an ICT or computer science teacher in a school is nominated to be trained as a facilitator for the STEAM program.

2. B2C Model

For our B2C model we have parents who sign up children for our platform. There are 2 modes online and offline. In the online model, children join us online from anywhere in the world and our joined by one of our trainers who facilitates their session. In the offline mode, children physically visit our campus and our again facilitated by our team of trainers. The B2C online mode costs around $50 where as the offline mode costs around $80. 

As mentioned in our business model we have 2 stream of revenues. B2B which targets schools and B2C where direct consumers sign up with us. We are currently sustainable where we're able to sustain our team. However we are in the process of gaining traction, signing up more clients and then we intend to go for raising investment from VCs. In between we also apply for grants that helps us with further development of our product. Our current MRR is around $11,000. 

Initially we started with our own savings in 2014. However we raised around $150,000 of angel funding around 2016. In 2018 we won a grant as part of the SPRING accelerator for an amount of $160,000. That helped us kickstart the development of LearnOSTEAM (which was initially named RobotWala). Then around 2020 during COVID we raised another seed round of $100,000 from another accelerator that helped us survive through the COVID lockdowns. Post the COVID lockdowns we have been able to sustain the company as now the market is opening up and we are signing up more clients.