myPeekaville
We're committed to improving the access to engaging social emotional learning education for early childhood educators and families to support early childhood development. With myPeekaville, families have a curated learning experience to help them introduce vocabulary and learning in a fun and interactive means. By engaging with Peekapak, educators and families around the world can better support their child's social emotional learning development and increase the odds for life life student success in academics, life and careers.
To teach social-emotional learning, educators face barriers including the lack of time, professional development and know-how to support parents in the learning process. Peekapak addresses all these challenges with our solution educators face.
Additionally, although social emotional learning is not a new concept, it's a fairly new concept for many families and the lack the knowledge to help support their child's development.
Our organization serves early childhood and elementary educators and their families with children ages 4-10. Often these students qualify for free or reduced lunch programs.
Developing these Core SEL Competencies early on has shown to increase academic and social growth of students drastically in school, as well as in professional environments. This has been shown to be particularly true in disadvantaged, ethnically diverse, and low-income communities
By offering myPeekaville, a personalized, game-based learning environment, students can practice social-emotional skills. myPeekaville offers an open game world full of quests that students can embark on by themselves, in their class, or at home with parents. Students are given the ability to create an avatar that best represents themselves in the world, and they are able to interact with Peekapak’s characters through a series of literacy based games and activities.
myPeekaville allows students to check-in daily and track how they are feeling on any given day. Teachers are able to access detailed analytics on students’ behavior and usage of the game that they can then relate back to academic performance and classroom behavior.
- Reduce barriers to healthy physical, mental, and emotional development for vulnerable populations
- Enable parents and caregivers to support their children’s overall development
- Growth
- New application of an existing technology
myPeekaville incorporates digital technology and game-based learning while being aligned to ELA and literacy to support the teacher, family and child. This allows families to incorporate Peekapak's social-emotional skill development in an engaging and fun way that is more accessible.
Furthermore, Peekapak can uniquely collect data across key stakeholders to provide system-wide insights to administrators.
myPeekaville uses game-based learning to incorporate literacy and social emotional learning to make teaching these skills easily accessible and engaging for families and students. myPeekaville is built using Unity Game Engine.
- Behavioral Design
Early research conducted by WestEd found "myPeekaville was a beneficial tool for supplementing the curriculum for SEL according to teachers evaluating the program", when tested with educators. Specifically;
The teachers felt that having myPeekaville as a computer game and online tool was valuable.
· Having an online experience in which students can interact with different social emotional learning skills was perceived to be a beneficial attribute of the myPeekaville games. One teacher commented; “My students are continuing to love and grow from this program. I love the way that it is set up online. It is easy to follow, engaging, and will benefit students!” This teacher gave further context and mentioned that her students are very tech savvy and having a game-like learning tool online is a very effective way to reach her particular students. Another teacher shared a similar sentiment expressing;
So, I think it was really helpful to have it on the game also because they’re so into technology that it was nice that the game is reinforcing what they’re learning out in the playground and out in real life. There’s like a technology game they’re excited about that is teaching the same lessons.
· These teachers emphasize that one of the most valuable features of myPeekaville is simply the fact that it is an online platform for students to engage in different social emotional learning games and scenarios. Having an online tool adds an exciting and motivating layer to social emotional learning.
- Children and Adolescents
- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Canada
- United States
- Canada
- United States
We've serve over 200k students and educators and see us reaching over 300k in a year and over 1 million in 5 years.
We want to ensure educators and parents are equipped and empowered to help the next generations of children grow up successful through engaging social-emotional learning resources that transform their life and love of learning. Our goal is to expand beyond North America and to bring this to millions of students around the world.
Education is very regional and understanding each region and their needs is very important for myPeekaville to be successful state by state. As such, having advisors to help navigate and more funding would help access more beneficiaries. Lastly, in education research is very important and can difficult to navigate for a new company.
We have started building a team of advisors, including Evo Popoff, former NJDOE Chief Innovation and Intervention Officer/Assistant Commissioner to help us understand the NJ market and Dr. Chary Cole, former SVP of Global Education of Sesame Workshop to help research our solution.
- For-Profit
Peekapak currently has 4 time full-time employees and 4 part-time contractors.
As the CEO & Founder, Ami has a MBA from INSEAD, experience from P&G scaling brands and teaching experience in K-4 classrooms. Ami has personally conducted over 300 educator interviews with educators to design Peekapak to meet the needs of her customers. As CTO, Clinton Chau comes with 20 years of software development experience. Clinton is a previous startup CTO & CEO of Clear Canvas, a health technology company he scaled to 18 employees and ensured its acquisition.
Peekapak has also worked closely with a team of advisors and researchers to ensure its curriculum and resources use the best practices in early childhood learning, including:
Dr. Kimberly Bezaire: An early childhood researcher and professor.
Diana Truong: An experienced elementary school teacher and a registered early childhood educator. She holds a Masters in Child Study & Education.
Roni Habib: Founder of EQ Schools, Roni earned his Masters of Education and teaching credential from Harvard University.
To scale our reach and brand across every school district across North America, we are launching national distribution partnerships in September with Nelson Education in Canada and to sell the storybooks availalbe in myPeekaville as a printed book series to make our learning accessible for families and educators who may not leverage technology in their classroom.
To date, Peekapak has scaled its solution through direct sales, reaching district leaders at targeted conferences and hosting regional thought leadership events. To scale our reach and brand across every school district across North America, we are launching national distribution partnerships in September with Nelson Education in Canada to sell Peekapak’s printed book series and drive referrals for premium subscriptions. Peekapak will also be launching 2 more partnerships in the US too.
The company Peekapak, that makes myPeekaville, plans to scale the sales of it's licenses to schools and early childhood centers through its new partnerships and increasing the size of our sales team.
We are applying to Solve to help advance our work and connect with like minded individuals and organizations to scale our reach and impact.
We’re excited about the opportunity to be are part of this opportunity and an ecosystem focused on improving access to early childhood development opportunities.
We believe technology is essential in reinforcing student learning while collecting data on student progress for teachers and parents to better understand a student’s needs.
- Business model
- Distribution
- Funding and revenue model
- Monitoring and evaluation
- Media and speaking opportunities
We would love to partner with mission orientated organizations that provide complementary services or products.
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