More than a month after launching its Early Learn App in India, Bengaluru-based online tutoring company Byju's is all set to launch an educational kit that would supplement its Early Learn App in India. The educational kit has been jointly developed by the in-house product development team of Byju's and the team from US-based Osmo, an educational games company that was acquired by the former early this year.
The kit will be commercially available in India in the next few weeks. The company is finding good traction for its Early Learn App in India and claims that there have been around one million downloads ever since its launch. Byju's is yet to finalise the pricing of the kit, but hopes that it will get a good traction as it will be a complete comprehensive kit along with the app. Byju's had earlier tied up with Walt Disney to develop the Early Learn App for children in the age group of 6-8 years.
“The main challenge for kids from first to third standard is to keep them highly engaged. This can be mainly done through stories, games and disney cartoon characters, etc. No kid is the same and has to be treated differently and hence, a lot of personalisation is built into this kit. The educational kit will be a supplement to the existing Early Learn App. The kit will use storytelling to create fun and playful learning experiences for children and will also help develop curiosity in them. Besides this, it will also use gaming principles to motivate them,” Vinay Ravindra, chief content officer, Byju's told THE WEEK.
Right now, the kit has thousands of hours of content across learning videos, disney stories, activities, disney games and interactive videos. The video lessons weave the teaching content into the story line, to help children retain information contextually and memorably. In the videos, three protagonist characters—DeeTee, Jax and Jane—explain all the necessary concepts with the use of manipulatives, games and quizzes. Besides this, there are interactive videos to assess a child’s understanding of the concepts. There are also digitally-enabled worksheets to help in hands-on learning and real-time feedback. It helps in the integration of offline to online learning experience through the Osmo platform.
“The app programs and the educational kit adhere to global education standards and curriculum criteria that the Common Core in the US, the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) in India and the UK Government Curriculum mandates. This alignment will help ensure that a child's learning is in sync with the global education system. What we have observed is that around 85 per cent of the educational curriculum across the world from class 1 to 3 is common, with only a little bit of customisation required,” Ravindra said.
Additionally, the Osmo technology helps in detection of shapes, numbers, letters and even images of characters and objects placed in front of the device in real-time. This real-time detection helps in giving real-time feedback to children of interactions that they are having in the physical world. "This ensures an offline integration so that students learn by doing," Ravindra added.
