This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 29, 2021 - April 4, 2021

Prerna Jhunjhunwala — founder of Creative Galileo, a budding education technology start-up — learnt at a young age that equity in education isn’t a given.

Her father was an entrepreneur who bought ailing industrial units, and the entire family would travel with him for months at a time as many of these companies were in the interiors of Odisha, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh in India.

As it required quite a bit of work to rehabilitate loss-making companies and turn them into profit-making ventures, the family was very much involved in the process and were assigned various tasks, including assisting the communities with their needs.

Though she was in her early teens herself, Prerna noticed how backward children her age were in their studies and how access to good quality education depended significantly on where they lived. “Some of the factories would have more than 5,000 workers and entire villages would be dependent on a factory for their livelihood. This is why our family used to spend a lot of time in these factories,” she recalls

“On weekends, the families of the workers would gather at the factories to pick up skills or practise their weaving and such. While the adults were doing that, I was assigned to help their children read and write. Most of the kids were around my age or slightly younger, but they were at least four years behind in terms of what we were learning.”

The experience made such a deep impression on Prerna that she knew she wanted to pursue a career in early education. The NYU Stern School of Business graduate was able to realise part of that dream when she established a preschool in Singapore (where she eventually settled down) in 2015.

As the quality of education that students receive directly correlates with their quality of life in the future, Little Paddington was founded to impart knowledge through immersive learning, deviating from the traditional worksheet-based learning, says Prerna.

“Singapore already has some of the best schools and some of the best schooling systems in the world. Little Paddington was squeezed between the legacy schools and regular schools in the country,” she adds.

“We started as a small neighbourhood school trying to make a mark. We chose to make learning immersive and play-based, and we must have got it right. We started with 60 children and 10 teachers. Today, we have more than 600 children from over 60 nationalities and 140 teachers across our five preschools.

“Our schools today have cookery stations, art stations, computer labs, a digital life studio similar to those at art science museums, where children can paint and the paintings are animated.”

But access to good early education has evaded many and continues to gnaw at her. The situation was only exacerbated by school closures related to the current Covid-19 pandemic.

The shift to remote learning was a blow to many students who were already vulnerable before the pandemic even started. Seizing the opportunity to realise her dream of democratising education, Prerna set up Creative Galileo and built an ultra-lightweight edutainment application that brings together the best of education and entertainment.

Using machine learning and ample data, the application provides a personalised learning experience for children between the ages of three and eight. The application focuses on the six learning domains: numeracy, language and literacy, arts and aesthetics, social and emotional learning, motor skills, and discovery of the world through narrative videos, gamification and personalised learning journeys.

Children are taught to identify the letters of the alphabet, numbers, colours and shapes as well as improve their vocabulary. The learning experience is delivered through a range of research-based games and videos designed to enrich and stimulate children.

Apart from encouraging them to be more responsive and helping them improve their reflexes, the app also focuses on inculcating values like friendship and kindness.

Prerna decided to start with the Indian market, where the ease of access to equitable education is still denied to many. In 2019, Unesco reported that only 62.8% of the population in India had enrolled for pre-primary education.

Using the same approach to learning as the curriculum at Little Paddington, the app teaches children through Little Singham, an animated television character that is renowned across the Indian subcontinent, and has had more than 42 million views. After obtaining the licences required to use other characters that appear in the Little Singham animated television series, the team worked to incorporate them into their well-established syllabus.

“Little Singham is a really well-known and popular character. I realised that the most important thing for a child to enjoy education is for the child to enjoy learning from the teacher. They need to be able to connect to the teacher and to be able to bond with the teacher. A child’s favourite subject is somehow intrinsically connected to their favourite teacher,” says Prerna.

“When I envisioned Creative Galileo, I thought about all the amazing characters that children love watching on screen. And I thought, why not make learning happen through them, instead of making random videos just to keep children entertained.

“So, we decided to provide an immersive learning experience for children through videos and gamification and make sure that parents are regularly updated. For example, if a child has spent 30 minutes in front of the screen, parents will know exactly what they learnt. As parents now have real-time updates on how their child is performing, they can even plan revision modules.”

As there are plenty of international early learning applications, Prerna was concerned that she would not be able to reach India’s complex and multifaceted demographics. “One of the biggest things I was worried about when we launched the app was whether I would be able to target the different demographics. Tier-1 cities are great, but will I be able to make the app into an all-India story or all-Indian subcontinent story?

“However, 34% of the downloads are coming from Tier-2 cities. And almost 30% are coming from Tier-3 cities and so forth.

“The second fear was that not everybody carries a high-end device. So, I wanted to make sure the app works well across all devices and is not too sizeable at 10MB.”

She also chose to create an app that did not feature a European or American accent to make it more relatable to her target audience.

Since its launch in July, the free app has seen more than one million downloads without much publicity on the part of the developers. It has not only gained momentum in India but also in underserved demographics in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan due to its easily accessible app infrastructure and design.

The initial success has given Prerna the impetus to expand the platform across Southeast Asia, particularly in countries like Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. Currently, the app is available in English, but she is working to make it available in the vernacular in the next six months. She adds that the company is in talks with the producers of internationally renowned animated characters that would appeal to a global audience.

According to the World Bank, coronavirus-related school closures risk pushing an additional 72 million primary-school-age children into learning poverty — meaning they would be unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. The organisation pointed out that the pandemic is amplifying the global learning crisis that had already existed: it could increase the percentage of primary-school-age children in low- and middle-income countries living in learning poverty to 63% from 53%, and it puts this generation of students at risk of losing about US$10 trillion in future lifetime earnings, an amount equivalent to almost 10% of global gross domestic product.

“I believe adversity is the mother of invention. During these times, we think outside the box and come up with 10,000 ideas on how to make learning better. And that is exactly what has happened in the field of education,” says Prerna.

“The biggest thing right now is the lack of quality education. The literacy rate varies a great deal around the world — Laos is at 58%, Cambodia at 74%, Myanmar at 76%. But the internet penetration rate in all these countries is really high. Across Southeast Asia, almost 400 million people use the internet.

“The internet can effectively become the leveraging tool that helps get quality education to even the most remote places in the world. So I think going forward, the world will have a very healthy mix of digital learning and physical learning.”

While there are no plans to introduce a paywall at the moment, Prerna says the company is looking into a “standard subscription model for a no-ads version or something like that”. “The most important thing is that we want to build an app that is vernacular so it can reach and connect with children whose first language is not necessarily English.

“Next, the learning process is not linear. A child’s progress is programmed through machine learning to understand the level of the child in the six learning domains. And then come the activities that are used to review their performance and subsequently to improve it.

“The app follows a proper curriculum and has a proper built-in progression. So, the app is almost like a teacher holding a child’s hand and taking him through the different levels.”

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