Baobabooks

In today’s world, students writing literacy abilities and skills are falling in part due to the rise of the internet and its tools but also due to COVID and its impact on education. At the same time, these same challenges are negatively impacting teacher’s ability to engage their students and spark their creativity. This, compounded by the increasing administrative burdens on teachers in the post-COVID era is creating an urgent need for tools that help educators and engage learners in their writing projects. 

Strong writing skills are fundamental to academic achievement and career readiness particularly as technology such as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent.

Students in disadvantaged geographies or who have been subjected to dislocation due to climate, conflict or other reason have an even greater difficulty accessing educational resources.

Baobabooks is a teacher-led and technology-enabled EdTech company offering a platform that is purpose-designed with teacher-friendly technology and a student-engaging UI/UX. 

Our digital platform has been purpose designed to support classroom-based and remote learning. 

We have functions and features, including those powered by AI, to help improve teacher productivity while at the same time providing more tailored, engaging, and focused feedback to enhance the learning experience and improve student writing. 

Our platform offers a range of tools that ignite student creativity, build communication skills, and encourage storytelling to improve writing skills while having fun.

We have developed curriculum focused on socio-emotional learning to help student thrive and add other structured content to allow teachers to chose and use this in their classroom assignments.

We run independent, theme-based creative challenged focus on such topics and the Unspoken Sustainable Development Goals, Earth Day and World Peace Day and invite student to submit written responses or art work that address the writing prompts and art prompts that we create to support each challenge.

Designed with teacher-friendly technology, our platform serves students aged 6-18 years of age both in develop and developing countries.  We are working with international schools. but also schools in financial challenged geographies such as Pakistan where 32 schools are using our platform for free. 

Learners can work at the own pace making our platform appropriate to ended with learned that have cognitive challenges and developmental disabilities, work we are piloting with a leading US care provider, Woods Organization.

We also engage with student who are in hospital and unable to engage with their schoolwork because of it while also being isolated and feeling down-trodden, work that has been informed there our project with Paris-based Gustave Roussy hospital Europe latest cancer care center for children.

We are very close to the market and are led by teachers who know first-hand what challenges are faced in the classroom and how best to address them.  We have integrated tools that empower educators to inspire students’ passion for writing and provide students with the support and freedom to find their unique voices. 

The platform aspires to unlock our students’ innate innovation and equip them with the tools to express themselves and make positive changes in the world. We understand the health & care segment from 20+ years of experience working in the industry and have the ability to tailor the platform to support the needs of teachers and students in these contexts. 

We also understand the power of story-telling, and its ability to build communities and have integrated tools to support the process. No other platform offers such an intuitive, fun, and engaging way to encourage and improve writing. We nurture creativity through writing.

One of our co-founders has a 20-year background in education and has taught on three continents.  Another of our co-founders has developed gaming based interfaces for the digital world and brings these talents and team to our platform.

Another of our co-founder has worked in technology startups and engaged with the market to lead commercialisation efforts while our fourth co-founder is a serial entrepreneur and understands scaling businesses.

We started our company in December 2020 and have carefully engaged first with one school to understand how to improve version 1.0, then with five schools to understand how to improve version 2.0, then with 35 schools to beta-test version 3.0.  We have spent four months integrating AI-based tools for learners and educators into our platform and will launch our commercial version, v4.0 in Q2 2024.

We have run trials with schools in remote settings such as Pakistan to understand how best to support them and have also run successful pilots in hospital and other care settings.

We are interested in finalising our go-to-market strategy while also building into our platform objective learning outcomes measure leveraging AI through a project we have defined in a program run by Research Educate Ventures.  We are very interest in leveraging relationship to extend our reach and impact as well.

We are engaging with educators in multiple settings and provide a platform that has been develop under the directions of educators who have mapped the functionality, features and flow of the platform to maximise its utility.  We have used gamers to design and build our platform to ensure that the UI/Ux is fun and interesting and engaging for our student users.

We are working in traditional and non traditional education settings.  We  support classroom based and remote learning.  

We have translated our platform into 9 languages with an ability to easily expanded based on interest and need.

By using our platform students will become more capable and confident writers. They will develop a deeper appreciation for reading and writing and see the authenticity and application of writing in real life.

This will be evidenced by:

• Increased student participation with positive scoring based on the grading rubrics 

• Positive community and educator feedback & comments

• Enhanced self-value expressed in our survey (post engagement)

In addition, in 2024 we will be integrating our AI-based objective learning outcomes measurement tool based on lexical density.  This will provide objective measurement of improvements in writing literacy overtime through the use of our platform.

Our impact goals are measure by users in the platform, the time users remain in the platform the number stories and art work submitted the number of schools who sign up and renew and the number of alternative learning setting we can support.  We also measure the number of communities we engage with and support and the number of partnerships we establish to leverage our platform across cultures, continents and time zones.

We have developed an AI-based methodology to objectively measure and assess learn outcomes based on lexical density and are seeing to implement this (with MT Solve's advice and input) in 2024.

We employ a number different solutions that we seamlessly leverage across our platform;

• Image hosting: AWS EC2 / S3

• Web hosting: AWS EC2

• Database: Amazon RDS

• Tech Stack:, Laravel, Tailwind, Vue3 and jQuery

We have several third-party dependencies;

• We can move away from AWS services without affecting anything

• We have an agreement with Pixabay to access their public image libraries

• Open AI and API Call but can substitute with other similar AI-service providers without impacting platform functionality

We have 9 people on our team now, 4 full time and 5 part time.

We created version 1 in December 2020 and after trialing in one school, revised based on their feedback and launched version 2.  We trialed this with 5 schools to gather further feedback before launch our beta version, version 3.0 which had more than 30 schools use and provide feedback.  We are just finishing work on version four which will also include AI-based tools for students and teachers and will be launched in April 2024.

Our founders are comprised of two women and two men.  One of our founders is from the Philippines, one from Madagascar, one from France and the last from the US.

Diversity is important to us as it helps ensure we are relevant to the communities we serve.

We are a B Corp "pending" and deciding if we should move to full B Corp status but somewhat disappointed by the cost.