Class of Wonders

At Class of Wonders we believe every child deserves equal access to positive, engaging and effective learning opportunities, and we are willing to fight extra harder to  make that a reality for the children who face educational disparities, solving the problem of educational gaps.  

We are doing it by building impact-driven edtech solutions for the School we envision: one where every child has access to engaging classroom experiences that unlock their full potential and ignite passion for learning. 

We value inclusion, equal opportunities and, of course, learning. At the end of the day what really fills our hearts is is seeing a child that was usually disengaged from school, and just had a wonderful experience in a classroom.

Co-founder and Chief of Operations Officer (COO). 

Responsible for identifying needs and opportunities for optimizing and/or expanding the organization activity and impact, managing new business processes and growth projects. Also responsible for the organization knowledge management.

As co-founder and COO, the team leader together with the supporting team (namely the Chief of Product) are well positioned to support the LEAP project as they both occupy senior C-level full-time positions within the organization, therefore having the time and autonomy/flexibility to commit the time needed to the LEAP project. 

On the other hand, MAGOS (the solution submitted under this LEAP project application) is the organization's "star" product.  Therefore, as an impact-driven, product-focused startup, the iteration and impact scale of MAGOS is at the top of the organization's strategic priorities. 

Engaging first language classes for every student, made possible by edtech accessible to any teacher.

According to UNESCO, more than 50% of students will end school without minimum literacy and numeracy proficiency. 

We created MAGOS to fight learning poverty, and ensure no child will end school without the minimum literacy foundational skill they need to thrive at school and in the future. 

MAGOS is a hybrid solution that includes an immersive print book connected to an intuitive, digital platform with state-of-the-art UX design, that challenges each student to explore a "land of magic" by presenting the student with a personalized sequence of reading, writing, listening, and grammar exercises that the student must solve using the book in weekly sessions throughout the school year. 

From the teacher's point of view, MAGOS is a useful turnkey educational resource, adapted to the local curriculum, that allows the teacher to "multiply" him/herself in the classroom, freeing the teacher to support the students who need it most, while providing real-time data on each student's performance.

We internally conducted:

• foundational research, through literature review on self determination theory and applied gamification to education;
• several formative agile R&D cycles, through human-centered design usability tests. We also regularly conduct user interviews with students and with teachers and we apply pre and post inquiries to the teacher using our product. 

During the product initial pilot stage we also conducted a quasi-experimental study, with a control group, using end of the year first language grades, validated by the a Public Educational Body, under a social impact bond. 

The data collected during the initial pilot phase of the product showed a positive difference of -10 p.p. in the percentage of students with negative grades in their first language at the end of primary school between the intervention group and the control group, resulting in a payback to the social investors based on these results under the Social Impact Bond. 

This positive result contributed to the further development of the product by expanding its content to more grades. 

On the other hand, both the baseline research and especially the ongoing formative research contribute to the continuous iteration of the product (already in its 2.4 version), adding new features and improving its content. 

As explained in the previous section of this application, since the pilot phase, we have only measured MAGOS results internally, and mostly from a teacher perspective. 

However, as an edtech product already with a +10k user-base, we have a large amount of anonymized data that we could tap into, and we also have great collaborative relationships with schools that we can activate to strengthen our solution evidence base. 

The LEAP project will be crucial because we are now entering the international scale/growth phase and starting to scale to other countries, namely in Africa and LATAM. 

We believe that the key research questions that would be useful to answer with a stronger evidence base to improve MAGOS' impact and further growth are

• What are the differences in students' motivation to learn and literacy skills before and after MAGOS? Do these outcomes differ in any way between students with and without socioeconomic disadvantages?
• How is this difference caused or influenced by the use of MAGOS in the classroom?
• What factors of use influence the results obtained (e.g. digital literacy of teachers, teacher training, time of use; etc.)? 

Some outputs could be:

- A monitoring and evaluation tool that combines our own game analytics and the results provided by the school, that we can run annually

- Revise our annual pre and post survey for teachers.

- Adding a pre and post skill and/or motivation test to a sample of students and/or to incorporate in the solution itself, thus improving the date made available for the teachers. 

On another perspective, targeting our social investors, it could be useful to develop our ROE metrics (Return on Education). 

We are open to other useful outputs. 

We plan to incorporate the results into the solution itself, automating its application to teachers and student users before and after intervention/use.  

This will allow us to simultaneously strengthen the MAGOS evidence base, make this data available to teachers and school leaders, contributing to a greater impact of the solution, and internally help us continuously identify needs for future improvements to the solution. 

As a result of these outputs, we expect to:

• Add new monitoring and reporting features to MAGOS that will increase its value to teachers and school leaders, thus contributing to customer retention and organic growth within education communities
• Easily attract new social/impact investors to scale MAGOS to new geographies in LATAM and Africa