One-line solution summary:
Math puzzles and DIY games delivered via WhatsApp to foster mathematical thinking and a growth mindset in underserved Latin American youth
Pitch your solution.
We are committed to helping the most underprivileged children in Latin America develop a healthy relationship with mathematics, learn basic problem-solving skills and obtain a growth mindset.
By delivering our content via WhatsApp we solve the access problem and succeed in exposing underserved populations to engaging math enrichment content that is both play-based and challenging.
We focus on improving students’ self-esteem and educating the participants and their parents about mindset and metacognition.
Our math challenges and DIY math games promote habits of mind, critical thinking skills, resourcefulness, and the ability to solve open problems creatively.
Our ultimate goal is to challenge students’ view of themselves as life-long learners who are capable of problem-solving success in whatever domain they wish to pursue.
If scaled globally, it will increase the number of underrepresented students motivated and supported to stay in school through and beyond high school.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The most underprivileged children in Latin America have very limited access to the Internet, instruction, or guidance. The Covid-19 epidemic has exacerbated this problem. The magnitude of the problems caused by the lack of proper education, guidance, and resources in children is impossible to underestimate.
Yet 95% of children in the region do have access to WhatsApp - through their parents' phones. By delivering our program via WhatsApp we can cost-effectively reach tens of millions of children, make them believe they ARE A MATH PERSON, and increase their interest in pursuing higher education, as well as their likelihood of future success, academically, professionally, and personally. There is extensive evidence linking education and motivation with future well-being.
What is your solution?
Each participant is assigned an individual code upon completion of an Airtable form.
We add cohorts to WhatsApp groups and deliver engaging math enrichment content directly to their phones on a weekly cycle for 12 weeks. All the material goes out in the form of photos and short videos to minimize the consumption of the very limited data and connectivity our users have.
For 4-7 year olds: guided math conversations to have throughout the child’s daily routine (mealtime, bedtime,…), and DIY math games to fabricate at home with recycled materials.
For 8-12 year olds: math puzzles along with complementary hands-on challenges to further the construction of knowledge.
The participants work on the puzzles, fabricate and play the math games and tackle the practical challenges on their own time. They submit their answers and evidence of their work directly to their Airtable portfolios via a linked form that we also share on Whatsapp.
Each individual portfolio is also a channel of communication. Parents can submit questions about implementation. Older participants can instantly check their corrected answers and receive formative feedback by trained volunteer moderators. We share the puzzle solutions in the form of short videos at the end of each week
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Wiixii is the offshoot of We Puzzle Together, which has been delivering recreational math puzzles and organizing math festivals in communities in Ghana, Senegal, India, the US and several Latin American countries for the past 20 years. We have countless testimonials from parents and teachers about how even a short exposure to this content and approach to learning can impact the academic success of students. “Our children are more motivated to learn. Our students have become leaders in their class, sharing math puzzles with their classmates. Our children are more focused on learning”.
The pandemic was the catalyst for building a scalable model for the delivery of the content in a way that can reach communities isolated due to the lockdown and lack of Internet.
We make it extremely easy for poorly educated parents to implement a math enrichment curriculum at home without incurring extra expenses and without having prior math skills. All they need is a smartphone and the willingness to spend a few minutes with their children learning together.
For our 8+ year-old users, the puzzles and challenges are an invitation to "do your best and become comfortable in the normal and unavoidable discomfort of learning something new".
We reach the children through schools, foundations, and companies that want to support the families of their workers.
We see evidence of acquisition of math competencies, improved self-esteem and habits of mind, and a huge impact on how parents perceive their children's capacity to learn. More than half of the families have reported improved math grades and a more positive mentality towards mistakes and math.
We are certain this will change academic trajectories and translate into more children staying in school, pursuing higher education and succeeding in their chosen domains.
Which dimension of the TPrize Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Design, create, and implement new educational or training models for educators and students that guarantee access to quality education in low connectivity environmentsExplain how the problem you are addressing, the solution you have designed, and the population you are serving align with the TPrize Challenge.
Our focus on helping the most underprivileged children in Latin America develop mathematical thinking, creativity, and a growth mindset is perfectly aligned with the TPrize Challenge. Furthermore, our program works both as a stand-alone solution for children without any other educational resource, as well as a complement for teachers and educational settings that are focused on traditional programs.
We have found that, in addition to the tremendous direct impact that Wiixii has on the children, educators, administrators, and parents also learn how to better support and engage their children.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Guatemala City, GuatemalaWhat is your solution’s stage of development?
Scale: A sustainable enterprise working in several communities or countries that is looking to scale significantly, focusing on increased efficiency.Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.
We are currently operating in 12 communities in Guatemala, Peru, Panama, Honduras, Venezuela and Colombia. Over 4,000 students have participated in our program and more participate every day.
The following are a representative sample of the specific communities in which Wiixii is operating:
A) Fe y Alegria: A non profit organization that works in the most vulnerable populations in Latin America. We are working through their schools in Guatemala and Peru.
B) Jupa: An extracurricular school for underprivileged youth in Panama. We are providing the content to the school and they are delivering it directly in the classroom.
C) Guarderías Infantiles: A non-profit organization of a MAQUILA in Honduras, we are working with the mothers providing the content so they can do it directly with their children.
D) CEMACO: a retail company in Guatemala. We are providing the content to the families of their employees.
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Jessica Hammer & Cindy Weitzman, Co-Founders
If you have additional video content that explains your solution, provide a YouTube or Vimeo link here:
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technologyWhat makes your solution innovative?
Our use of WhatsApp for communicating with the children makes our platform significantly more scalable and accessible than solutions based on websites, apps, or other media. Additionally, our use of Airtable as a back end allows us to track all the children's interactions and perform sophisticated analysis on performance, engagement, and retention.
We've optimized our content both from a pedagogical standpoint as well as for effectiveness within the technologies that we are using. And we've developed everything to be scalable and accessible by the most underprivileged communities.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
We rely on the integration of WhatsApp for communications and Airtable for data collection and programming logic. We leverage the fact that 95% of households in the region can interact with our technology through their smartphones.
The use of Airtable is very cost-effective and flexible, allowing us to constantly refine our processes and perform sophisticated analytics on the data, without the need for expensive tools or programmers.
WhatsApp and Airtable also have APIs that we will leverage in the future to make our platform more scalable and responsive.
The activities are inspired by classical math games. We draw inspiration from some of the most progressive and creative math educators in the world including NRICH (Cambridge University), Youcubed (Stanford University), Math for Love, The Global Math Project, The Julia Robinson Maths Festivals, Alex Bellos, Nob Yoshigahara, Art of Problem Solving, and many others.
Provide evidence that this technology works. Please cite your sources.
We rely on proven technologies already in use by hundreds of millions of people. Furthermore, our implementation has proven to work well with the thousands of students that have participated in our programs.
Here is a video of our program for the younger participants.
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
Does this technology introduce any risks? How are you addressing or mitigating these risks in your solution?
There are no technical risks to our implementation.
Select the key characteristics of your target population.
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
In which countries do you currently operate?
How many people does your solution currently serve? How many will it serve in one year? In five years?
Our program currently serves over 4,000 participants. We expect to benefit 100,000 in the next year, to reach one million children in three years, and over ten million in five years.
The above are those benefiting directly from the program. We are also currently working with teachers, providing them with the material so they can continue benefiting all their students after our program is over, and we are also working together with Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, training their future teachers (who become our moderators as part of their training) and they will continue impacting the life of all their students during their teaching careers. Therefore our impact will be much bigger, and reach more beneficiaries than the ones we have in our platform.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and -- importantly -- how will you achieve them?
During 2021 we grew over 10x to serve thousands of children. Our plans are to grown another 10x or more next year, and scale to help a hundred thousand children by the end of next year. Five years out we hope to reach over ten million children.
We reach children through schools, foundations, and companies that want to help their workers' children.
In order to achieve our goal we are partnering with different sectors, like the non profit sector through organizations like Fe y Alegria that have operations in more than 19 countries and have a network of more than 1,200 centers. We are also in conversations with the government of Chile to reach more than 2,500 families with our early childhood program (4 to 7 years old), big international organizations like World Vision with whom we are currently working on a program to reach 175,000 children in the highlands of Guatemala over the next 3 years, and private companies that will use our programs as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility strategy.
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
Goal 1- Reach and engagement: Daily surveys generate massive amounts of data that allows us to track number of users and level of engagement, perception of learning as well as performance in solving the puzzles and challenges over time. The flexibility to change the daily surveys and to target subgroups in the program affords a unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the program. Thus we can easily track the consistency of each user’s participation and address unproductive struggle. Additionally, we can analyze engagement with each puzzle and challenge in order to fix problematic content (clarity, fun factor, need for more scaffolding). This will allow us to continually iterate and improve.
Goal 2 - Impact: We plan to do many large randomized trials in diverse communities to measure the effectiveness of our programs. We are currently running a trial with 850 students from 5th and 6th grade from Fe y Alegría schools in Perú. We will use pre/post student surveys developed by Stanford University Youcubed to measure: beliefs about Math (conceptual, connected to the world), beliefs about error and speed (reducing math anxiety), and beliefs about who can learn (mindset, effort, persistence, struggle). We will also measure changes in mathematical learning with program metrics, school data, and analysis of student work samples.
Additionally, the Airtable platform allows us to share anonymized data with external researchers. We are very open and excited to contribute to the understanding of the science of learning.
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
How many people work on your solution team?
- 3 full time Employees: CEO, COO and CTO
- 3 part-time: Coordinator of moderators, Web developer, graphic designer.
- 29 volunteer moderators who are all pursuing a Teacher degree in the Department of Education at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
- Additional volunteers are helping with data analytics and technology.
How long have you been working on your solution?
2
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Jessica Hammer co-founded Programa Valentina to address underemployment in at-risk populations in Guatemala and was the executive director of Funsepa, leveraging technology to improve education in rural Guatemala. Jessica holds a degree in Biology from Brandeis University, and a master's degree in International Health from the University of Copenhagen. Jessica is responsible for operations and marketing.
Cindy Weitzman has a PhD in Molecular Biology from UCLA and a PostDoc from UCSF. She has 20+ years of experience designing educational enrichment programs in Ghana, Senegal, India, and Latin America. She is the founder of WE PUZZLE TOGETHER, which organizes recreational math experiences. Cindy is responsible for content and pedagogy.
Sasha Palencia is the founder of CrehabiliTI.club and has 10 years of experience designing academic programs related to creative technology. Sasha has a degree in Systems Engineering from the Universidad de San Carlos and an MBA from the Mesoamerican University. She is a university professor, children's tutor, and homeschool mom. Sasha is our CTO.
Advisors:
Ariel Poler has a BS in Mathematics from MIT and an MBA from Stanford. He is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, board member, and investor.
Jack Dieckmann is the Director of Research at youcubed (Stanford University School of Education).
Graciela Perez is a Fulbright Grantee and former Enseña Chile Teacher (Best Teacher Award) with a PhD in Economics of Education from Stanford University. Graciela and Jack are co-authors in the study Changing Students' Minds and Achievement in Mathematics: The Impact of a Free Online Student Course.
What is your approach to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team?
Our founding and leadership teams is comprised of Hispanic women.
Our web developer and coordinator of moderators are from Central America.
Our volunteer moderators are currently from Guatemala. We plan to train additional moderators from the communities we serve.
As we grow we plan to expand our team primarily with individuals in the communities that we serve.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)Why are you applying to the 2021 TPrize Challenge?
We are excited by the resources that the TPrize would provide. In particular, we would greatly benefit from interacting with relevant experts and organizations in Latin America and in the world of education in general.
Introductions to mobile operators in the region would be most helpful, to help us address the challenge of the cost of data. We would also benefit from experts that can help us optimize our content and our technology.
As we scale, we want to collaborate with educational institutions in the region that can help us scale our network of moderators.
Finally, we hope that the TPrize network can help us reach companies, schools, and foundations interested in offering our programs to their children.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Please explain in more detail here.
We would benefit from partners who help us grow our team, both of full-time employees, contractors and advisors.
We could benefit from local experts in each of our target countries and communities.
Introductions to companies, schools, and foundations would accelerate our growth.
We are always looking to optimize our technology implementation.
Solution Team
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Cindy Weitzman Co-Founder, Wiixii
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Solution Name:
Wiixii