ICANDO

We solve the limited development of 21st century skills among Indonesian learners. Considering the risk it brings to the whole generation, we pay attention to the early children aged 3 to 9 years old who are in their Early Childhood Education (ECE) and lower primary level because early children are in their golden age in which eighty percent of brain development occurs during this period.

Similar to other countries, Indonesian early learners, who are in their prime, are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, Indonesian students consistently underperformed in literacy, mathematics, and science when compared to other OECD member countries, as evidenced by periodic PISA tests. The condition was then jeopardized by the pandemic, which was caused by school closures beginning in early 2020 and an inability of the infrastructure to support online learning. With many parents facing job loss or wage reduction, early education is frequently overlooked. Prior to the pandemic, only 38% of early learners were enrolled in school. The figure declined by 50% by mid-2020. Furthermore, there are only 47% of early childhood educators have a diploma in Indonesia. The majority of them are women who are also struggling financially to support their families, necessitating the addition of a second job or two. Indonesian parents, on the other hand, are rarely involved in their children's education. During the pandemic, online learning was extremely difficult for early learners, all the more so because parental engagement is critical prior to or during the learning process, but those parents are also juggling work from home. 

To solve the stated problems especially for the underserved children, ICANDO provides integrated game-based learning materials to students, parents, and teachers. This allows students to enjoy learning while parents and teachers collaborate more effectively in planning, monitoring, and evaluating students' progress. This solution is implemented in a variety of ways:

1. Providing early learners with access to ICANDO Kids, a collection of over 2,000 interactive assessment materials in a form of games which are designed toward the development of fundamental and durable skills.

2. Empowering teachers through the use of ICANDO School, a learning management system that alleviates administrative burdens and enriches instruction with step-by-step guides to innovative learning. The LMS is integrated with ICANDO Kids, which enables teachers to use the game for assessment purposes and to deliver more personalized learning when necessary based on recorded attainment data.

3. Equipping parents with ICANDO Parents, that is connected to ICANDO School in order for parents and teachers to communicate effectively about their children's learning. 

4. Developing community-based game-based solutions in rural areas that lack internet connectivity. For these areas, we collaborate with the local authority to provide the "SMART TABLE," a table equipped with four tablets that contain ICANDO and can be used offline. The table is connected to ICANDO Village, a dedicated platform to be used by parents, volunteers from the Family Welfare Programme, or local administrators to deal with not only children education but also their welfare and wellbeing. 

Through these products, we hope to connect each educational stakeholders for the betterment of the underserved children. 

We have been working hand-in-hand with the regional government and several organisations for both marketing and development aspects.

In terms of marketing, we have been collaborating with Early Childhood Education (ECE) teacher associations as our distribution channels. Those associations are HIMPAUDI (The Association of Indonesia’s ECE Teachers and Personnel) and IGTKI (The Association of Indonesia’s Kindergarten Teachers). To illustrate, there are 133,302 ECE schools in Java island only, which comprises 56.6 % percent of total schools in Indonesia. HIMPAUDI consists of 62,695 (47%) schools while IGTKI is composed of 70,463 (52.9%) schools. We make use of these connections by providing webinars and canvassing the attendees through each association.

Besides, we work with academicians from several universities for research and development purposes. The universities include The Electronic Engineering Polytechnic Institute of Surabaya, The State University of Jakarta, and Trunojoyo University. We invite them to join a collaborative research and confirm our development plans. We also opened several internship programs from the aforementioned universities. 

As a result, we have been able to improve our products from time-to-time and obtained 80 percent more customers in the first trimester of 2022.

ICANDO focuses on providing game-based education within an integrated ecosystem, such as a school or village community, in order to assist early learners in developing STEM and the 21st century skills. 

We are actively engaged with the regional education offices and teachers' association in the development of school ecosystems that include integrated apps for teachers, parents, and students. However, the same approach cannot be used in remote areas without access to the internet. This is why we developed Smart Table in collaboration with village administrators, family and welfare volunteers, parents, and children for use in the village. 

In our theory of change, we expect more students to be able to improve their learning attainment, for example catching up with the learning loss they experienced during the pandemic, and more parents to be engaged in their children learning. Moreover, we forecast more teachers to make a greater impact by implementing a more innovative teaching method. Finally, we hope to gain more support from the community through the NFT to help the underserved population, especially those living in villages with insufficient internet connection, to improve STEM and 21st century skills through Smart Table. 

Finally, our primary objective that we set as the long-term impact of the product is to assist early learners in growing and developing as lifelong learners, so they can be the best versions of themselves, confidently facing the future. We hope that by empowering teachers, parents, students, and the village community, we can also improve their quality of life.

In our approach, we use game-based learning in our effort to develop STEM and 21st century skills because of its ability to improve motivation (Ryan and Rigby 2020) and cognition (Mayer 2020). To measure our impacts which have been stated in our theory of change, we currently measure (1) children's development; (2) school participation; (3) parental participation; and (4) village participation.

With reference to Nesta's Standard of Evidence, we are in the Level 4 of the standard in some of the aforementioned evaluation. In terms of participation numbers, we do track our progress periodically and use the data to design better content or better approaches. For example, we provide an adoption team as a result of insufficient traction aftersales. Additionally, we have independent researchers evaluating the efficacy of ICANDO reporting positive result in children's STEM skill, learning engagement, ease of use for teachers, and students' satisfaction. These result is carefully curated to help us improve our contents or UI/UX designs. 

We do aware that there are more data analysis to conduct and actions to be taken afterwards. This is why we do expect LEAP can facilitate fellows and our company to cooperate in integrating data into our theory of change to impact more people.

We track our progress toward our impact goals on a regular basis.

To begin, we count the number of schools and villages that have been registered and activated through each channel of cooperation. We ensure that each school or village can effectively use ICANDO. Considering the issue of digital literacy, we provide an adoption team that can assist teachers and village administrators while also monitoring their engagement.

Second, we track the number of teachers and village administrators who actually use the app to support children's learning by collecting data on the features they most frequently use. Likewise, we will be able to determine how teachers optimize their use of ICANDO for assessment in this manner.

Thirdly, we evaluate the recorded data to determine the effectiveness of our games when used as an assessment tool. When we track children's development in each game, we collect the following data: timestamps on when each child begins and ends the game, the outcome, the frequency of trials, and the duration of the game. We analyze the data to determine whether the child's performance has improved in their trials, either through improved results or a shorter time required to complete the game. For instance, if a student with ID No. 529xx played a particular game five times and received two stars on each trial, but the duration decreased significantly from 50 seconds to 18 seconds, we can conclude that the student improved in that particular skill.

Equipping early-learners of Indonesia with 21st century skills by providing inclusive and accessible game-based learning for everyone

We humbly expect LEAP fellows to be involved in our effort to widen our impacts by focusing on how to improve the utilization of game-based learning in a community with low digital literacy and insufficient internet infrastructure.

The potential deliverables would include:

1. The most appropriate evaluation method to measure traction in ICANDO School, Parents, and Kids
2. Children's cognitive development, especially critical thinking and creativity
3. The most effective adoption process to increase teachers' digital literacy
4. The suitable approach of planning, installing, and monitoring the use of ICANDO in underprivileged villages

In our five-year vision, we expect to be able to widen our impact in alleviating STEM and 21st century skills in early learners in Indonesia by concentrating our efforts on the island of Java which has 11 million early learners. We intend to establish new cooperation with around 3,000 schools in several cities and suburban areas throughout Indonesia. In rural areas, we anticipate that over 4000 (5% of total Indonesia’s underserved villages) will embrace Smart Tables and the Village Platform.