Polygloteto - Multilingual Childhood Education Platform

Polygloteto helps parents who are deciding whether and how to educate their children multilingually. Growing up speaking more than one language is beneficial and reduces inequalities, often due to low socioeconomic status. Bi- or multilingualism helps their cognitive and social development [1] and prepares them well for their adulthood and even old age. [2]

Our platform offers scalable support in that our consultants live in various world regions and can travel to clients, as well as a website and an app. The latter provides crucial information to parents on how to proceed and create a beneficial multilingual environment for their children. Every personal situation is different, of course, and the app will reflect this in giving only information relating to parents’ specific needs. In addition to this, the newest research results will be adapted as quickly readable information, so as to keep users up to date.

Even though bilingualism occurs in approximately half of the world’s population, many parents are highly sceptical about educating their children in multiple languages and that monolingual families living in a same-language region cannot offer their children an effective multilingual environment. They often believe that it could be detrimental to their development. Many parents fear that if their children do not speak the regional language at home, they will face problems at school and later on, especially in families of low socioeconomic status. Speaking multiple languages is clearly an advantage in cognitive abilities, opportunities and strong cultural stimulation, not only in linguistically varied environments.

Monolingual infants at 12 months already lose the ability to differentiate between sounds not occuring in their mother tongue. [3] Bilingualism also helps keep people connected to their cultural heritage and combats losses thereof.

1: Pettito (2009). New Discoveries From the Bilingual Brain and Mind Across the Lifespan: Implications for Education.

2: Alladi et al. (2013). Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status.

3: Werker (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life.

We are serving parents interested in educating their child multilingually and who are wondering if and how to proceed. In addition, talks for different parent audiences are part of our offer, such as kindergartens, companies, migration associations and similar. We are constantly expanding our outreach, so as to better include minority groups of lower socioeconomic status. These groups may not actively be looking for help, but their children could strongly benefit from our support, thus removing economic, educational and developmental barriers.

The age of the children concerned varies, as multilingualism can be achieved at any stage of life, but as mentioned before - the earlier, the better.

Our solution strongly improves early child development, socially and cognitively, as well as enhancing linguistic and cultural diversity.

Being an international team from various backgrounds on how we achieved fluency in multiple languages, many of us followed educational programs related to multilingualism. Thus, we are all well informed of the current research status on how to best proceed when aiming for bi- or multilingualism.

Polygloteto includes a website and an app in various languages, as well as in-person contacts between our consultants and parents, through talks and family-specific support. As every family situation is different, we will cater for various needs - before accessing our app directly, parents will fill in a quick questionnaire, so as to spare them precious time and only provide them with information needed in their specific circumstances. This app will also offer parents in similar situations the opportunity to get in touch with each other and exchange on their personal experience, as we will connect them if they wish to enhance the use of languages also among such children.

Polygloteto serves a set of information to a worldwide audience on a scaled basis, which cannot be accessed easily by parents in different communities and cultures. After researching extensively about methods and accessibility of information, digital media contact sharing will finally result in the best possible usage by a wide audience.

The core technology will be an AI-based mobile application, which assesses by certain base parameters a best possible consulting experience for parents, how in their individual situation to ideally raise a child multilingually. Based on a dataset of example cases and a machine learning engine, which constantly feeds the app with new data as well as the cross-connection of existing data, we will enable a unique platform. In turn, this will permit displaying the needed information in a short time.

In over 15 successful cases so far, our team was able to consult families with the individualized knowledge to raise their children multilingually. Since these cases showed an over 90% success rate due to diligent and clear consulting, other families will be able to benefit from the same service and have the ideal set of information to raise their children with several languages.

Until now, we have served 15 families (around 20 children) through personal consultations and speaking events at companies such as Trivago or Sumitomo Corporation. We are constantly expanding our outreach, so that we are going to be able to serve around 100,000 parents in one year, and several million in five years from now.

Our goal is to make more children be proficient in multiple languages. We are developing the website and app, as well as improving our personal consultations. The expansion of our outreach will be achieved via our website and app, as well as through talks and workshops. Setting the digital solutions up as the app and web platform is key in the first year. In the following years we will be setting up a global network of locations with teams, who can cater to local groups on the topic, which will be key for our growth and development.

Limited financial resources for app-development and financial resources for our database and the included machine-learning based engine. Setting up a company and having the support to pivot on the scalability of the solution will be a major challenge to overcome.

Use capacities in our network to develop the mobile application with experienced developers in our team. Also, usage of a consulting company which is specialized on machine-learning based data processing in our friends network.

As of today, we have seven individuals being part of the wider team in the global range. Concerning the core team, four members are part of the actively collaborating circle.

We ourselves have experienced multilingual environments when growing up and as adults. In addition, our team’s fields of expertise include bilingualism, neuroscience, consultation, business development and information technology.

Currently some corporate companies (as mentioned, Sumitomo Corporation or Trivago) invite us to hold speaking events to target their employees. This is solely for information sharing purposes, without any funding as of today but possible in future.

The business model is a subscription-based model for parents to access and use the platform as well as the support by corporates, who are willing to invest in such additional benefit for their employees (especially large tech companies with employees in prospective-parent age). This will vary throughout communities to ensure access by low-income households as well.

The subscription-based model targets a fee of currently around 500 USD per family as a total investment. After pre-accessing the value of multilingualism to parents, the value of adding one language to a child varies between 500 - 40,000 USD.

Having said this, within the first year of operation of the platform it will be possible to start the paid service as well as in the initial stage to obtain funding from different public sources as well, to enable low-income communities to use the service on a larger scale and show the proof of concept for a financially stable model.

Solve being connected to the MIT, it could support technological development required for our solution and increase our global interdisciplinary contacts. In turn, Solve could vastly improve the worldwide impact of our solution.  

Any funding by Solve would be used mainly to cover app development, website and travel cost.

Being part of a social impact accelerator programme and having the support of a team of experienced individuals for a global rollout of our system would be a key asset for the development of our team and plattform.

We would like to use the datasets of families which have raised children multilingual successfully to determine a pattern to success for individual families. 

The extraction and cross-connection of data as well as the assembly of personas will require a solid AI engine for the best usage of such data.