Solution Overview & Team Lead Details

Our Organization

Sparkling MIndz

What is the name of your solution?

Wizets

Provide a one-line summary of your solution.

Wizets is a game platform for developing 21st-century skills and fostering global awareness amongst children of ages 6-16 years

Film your elevator pitch.

What specific problem are you solving?

The platform we have created is solving the following problems:

1. With the rise of AI and other integrative technologies 21st-century skills and global citizenship become crucial for a future-ready workforce.

  • in 2023, Analytical thinking is considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill and constitutes, on average, 9% of the core skills. Creative thinking, another cognitive skill, ranks second, says a WE Forum report
  • According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, the demand for social and emotional skills, such as empathy, collaboration, and cultural awareness, is expected to rise by 22% in the United States and 26% in Europe by 2030. 
  • In a survey conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (12), 73% of employers stated that they prefer candidates with strong 21st-century skills, including problem-solving and critical thinking, over those with high academic achievement.

2. Organizations across the world are trying to implement 21st-century skills and raise awareness towards global issues and SDGs but there are problems at the ground level:

  • According to a survey conducted by OECD, which analyzed the implementation of 21st-century skills in schools across 19 countries, the following were identified as the major challenges - teacher training, emphasis on standardized testing, limited collaboration and integration, resistance to change and lack of resources
  • 21st Century Skills in India's Education System: Barriers and Opportunities report by UNESCO identifies various barriers to the implementation in India, such as outdated curriculum, lack of teacher training, inadequate infrastructure, and limited resources

3. Research shows that students who learn about global issues are more than twice as likely to see the importance of personally taking social action but the levels of awareness amongst students continue to be low globally 37% in the US and 35% in the UK 

  • The aggregate mean percentage score of students on democratic citizenship in urban India as measured by Yuva Nagarik Meter is rather low at 21%, says a CMCA report.
  • In 2018, World Vision UK conducted a survey of 1,000 primary school children in the UK aged 8-12. The survey found that 85% of the children were concerned about issues. However, 60% felt powerless to make a difference.

4. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mental health conditions account for 16% of the global burden of disease and injury in people aged 10-19 years 

  • Globally, as per WHO findings, one in seven 10-19-year-olds  experiences a mental disorder. Depression, anxiety, and behavioral disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents when unchecked extend to adulthood limiting opportunities
  • In a survey conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in India, it was found that 7.3% of children between the ages of 4 and 16 years suffer from mental health problems.

With rising global challenges and shifting paradigms in the future of work, it is imperative to work on overcoming barriers to delivering 21st-century learning and active global citizenship to school-going children today. 

What is your solution?

What is the solution? 

Wizets is a game-based platform that delivers 21st-century skills and fosters global awareness amongst students ages 6-16 years.

  1. When children enroll they are baselined for their knowledge, skills and awareness levels of the global challenges through a web application
  2. Children get to choose the mission (the global challenge) and there are four missions on the platform currently arrived at the partner K12 school via child-led emergent learning:
    1. Climate Change (TRUI)
    2. Child Vulnerability (MCV)
    3. Community, Stories, and Practices (CSP)
    4. Healthy Living (SM Plates)
  3. Children are assigned to an age-banded cohort (6-8, 9-12 or 13-16 years) that plays the game on a weekly basis and is hosted by a facilitator 
  4. Each year children are part of four-game sprints with five weekly game plays.
  5. In each round of the game, children share their connections to the larger problem, do peer evaluation, and have small group discussions followed by collaboratively generating a collective output that the team presents together. 
  6. As knowledge and skills improve so do the scores in each of the sub-stage of the game and the collaborative output improves too. As part of each sprint, children undergo virtual master classes to build knowledge and specific skills on research, and different types of output presentations.
  7. Every sprint whatever children contribute towards the mission becomes a part of their portfolio as knowledge, skills, and change-making points. Based on these points children earn levels of mission projects - personal, local, and global.
  8. Apart from the game-play online children also meet up with the entire Mission community (all the children who are part of a mission on the platform) in offline or hybrid modes to discuss ideas, take action, and scale impact. For example, if as a solution a team creates a campaign for e-waste collection, then the children agree to conduct the campaign on the ground.

How does the solution solve specific problems?

Addressing the low awareness levels of global problems:

  1. The game-based nature of the platform ensures that children use 21st-century skills to connect deeply to the global problems 

Create a sense of belonging and purpose for children to help combat rising mental health issues: 

  1. Being part of the game process and the mission community boosts children's sense of belonging and creates a sense of purpose. 
  2. Also, the game-play has components that happen in a facilitator-hosted game space, community-hosted mission space, and individual-focused self-paced space, all of which can build agency and voice in children.

Reducing the barriers to implementing 21st-century learning:

  1. The platform empathizes with the facilitator and does not expect her to be an expert. It enables training in the same game flow as children and will provide the scaffolds to support children's gameplay.
  2. The resources shared to upskill knowledge will be age-appropriate and engaging and as the outputs reveal the levels of understanding it will enable iteration for contextualization
  3. The platform through AI/ML can contextualize resources, monitor children's ideas, provide nudges when children are stuck, and provide feedback on solutions.

Wizets Play Demo Here

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Our Target Audiences

The solution aims to serve different types of target populations using a community-based approach. The platform specifically targets children between the ages of 6-16 years. 

Under the B2C model, the platform will be launched to a global audience specifically targeting aspirational parent communities that are looking for meaningful ways to engage their children in proactive action towards global issues and in prosocial purpose-driven life.

Under the B2B model, it is becoming a norm for schools to include opportunities for active citizenship for children and we offer a very unique provide platform for change-making given our existing K12 implementation. Research shows that in schools in areas of high deprivation, a global perspective can help to raise the aspirations of young people.

The schools can use the platform along with the predesigned content modules for the four mission areas that are already being developed on the platform or they can choose to license the use of the platform to set up content modules for other impact areas as well. 

Through the licensing model, we also wish to create a B2G segment to target governmental and non-governmental organizations to encourage schools, educators, and parents across different kinds of socio-economic backgrounds to provide access to 21st-century skills and global issues in a contextually appropriate manner. 

How our platform impacts them?

The platform creates communities of children who can engage in longer durations of active problem-solving and change-making in coordination with our parent K12 school mission communities and mentors. 

The organizations need a streamlined approach to offering a curriculum for change-making, along with skill-building and ways to assess learning. The platform provides these solutions. It also solves the need for high-technology and high-touch quality monitoring through its game-based, peer-evaluation, small-group collaboration approach. 

A facilitator's dashboard ensures the necessary knowledge and skill upskilling is available through the game-based platform to build empathy and a deeper understanding of how children experience the game flow. This along with information on children's skill levels, game plays, knowledge components, outputs created, and the larger community impact each child has contributed towards - making it a whole child impact view. 

For education leaders and administrators it ensures there is each child's whole view is available along with the facilitator's training levels, game scores as well as the measurement of impact created. 

Parents' inputs and observations on the child's knowledge and skill components are also collected on a regular basis and made available to both facilitators and the leader/admin dashboards. 

The platform also offers a Parent Dashboard which will serve as a resource center for parents and caregivers to be able to support their children's learning and real-world application of problem-solving for change-making. 

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

Our team includes a range of professionals from diverse educational and professional backgrounds and includes the functions of Leadership, Design, Technology as well as Execution working as an integrated, iterative system.

Below are the details of the core team members: 

Sreeja Iyer (Founder, CEO) is an Engineer and MBA graduate from ISB, Hyderabad turned educator with an overall experience of 20 years (12+ years in designing game-based pedagogy for children). With an excellent track record in academics, she felt she was all set for life only to discover feeling unfulfilled at her work. Her realization of the gap between the education space and the real world led her to embark on the journey of building the pedagogy of purpose. She has spearheaded the creation of 'Mission based' learning frameworks by staying present to what children think as problems and designing processes, frameworks, and tools to make them tangible and actionable with community engagement, product creation, customer feedback, master classes, and connecting learning with purpose. 

Minesh Happy (Chief Mentor) born and raised in Andaman & Nicobar Islands, far from civilization, he attended a seminar on saving coral reefs at the age of 10. It was life-changing and developed a belief in his own agency to contribute. He designs the agency and self-efficacy components of the platform. He is also the chief mentor for the facilitators and empowers them to account for learner variability.

Poorva Agarwal (Curriculum Developer) was looking for a space where she can contribute to the design of a curriculum that is more meaningful and relevant for children in the current era. She has an MA in Education from Azim Premji University and has authored four children's books in multiple languages. She has used the serious learning games design framework to develop one for reading comprehension. She is co-creating the framework for Purpose-based pedagogy and has worked closely with all the Changemaking Missions to facilitate the transformation into outputs like campaigns, poetry, drama, street plays, etc. 

Kishore (Full Stack Developer) is a B. Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from NIT, Calicut, with 12+ years of experience, and has been working on the development of the Wizets platform since July 2022. He has prior experience of being an educator in alternate schools and developing content, assessments, and analyzing data for an Edtech platform. His search for a purpose-driven ed-tech platform is what led him to join Wizets. He has a passion for using programming for education. He has also led a team of web programmers who developed educational games, simulations, and interactive modules.

Apart from this core team, each of the 4 Missions has two Mission Mentors. 

Each of them is currently working full-time at the Parent K-12 School, as facilitators. Apart from facilitation skills, they have been developing pedagogical content knowledge within the impact domain they serve. They also are personally motivated towards the impact area and have chosen the Mission which they mentor themselves. 

Detailed team descriptions can be found here:

 https://www.sparklingmindz.in/...

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Provide access to improved civic action learning in a wide range of contexts: with educator support for classroom-based approaches, and community-building opportunities for out of school, community-based approaches.

In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?

Bengaluru, India

In what country is your solution team headquartered?

  • India

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Pilot: An organization testing a product, service, or business model with a small number of users

How many people does your solution currently serve?

We ran a pilot with 70 children in the age group of 8-16 years across the country apart from testing the product in house at the parent K-12 school. Children found it engaging and useful as a learning platform.

Why are you applying to Solve?

Change-making and problem-solving for civic action require a community-based approach. The Wizets platform working towards change-making and purpose-driven, prosocial learning has embedded in its design the creation of active communities of children as changemakers, along with MIssion mentors.

Similarly, as an organization working towards change-making and purpose-driven, prosocial learning, we also believe that a community-based approach works best. At the start of the year, it was decided as an organizational goal to reach out to other like-minded communities of creators, entrepreneurs, educators, and changemakers, and applying to MIT Solve is a step in the same direction for us. 

  1. Visibility and Recognition: When unlocking B2B and B2G markets a validation from MIT Solve would mean a lot for the platform's credibility and access to those institutions globally creating opportunities for growth and collaboration. Solve promotes and showcases the selected solutions through various channels and this exposure will attract a wider audience, including parents and educators, creating awareness about the platform and the critical need to address 21st-century skills development and global awareness in children.
  2. Access to Resources and Connections: With MIT Solve we can gain access to a vast network of potential collaborators and advisors in various fields, including education, technology, and social innovation. This will help to strengthen the game platform's implementation and scalability. Additionally, it can facilitate connections with potential research partners, educational institutions, and policymakers which is going to be critical for the growth of the Wizets platform. 
  3. Research and Impact Measurement: We are currently trying to create metrics to measure impact and we believe that measuring impact under social innovation requires more than just a quantitative approach. As we are setting up systems to measure impact, we find there is a lack in our home country currently, of the expertise required to do so in robust ways. Apart from support in understanding and setting up impact measurement metrics and systems, we also want to foster research partnerships to be able to further the understanding and insights gained from the platform. 
  4. Collaboration and Growth Opportunities: MIT Solve creates a collaborative environment where innovators from diverse backgrounds come together to tackle global challenges. Participating in Solve provides opportunities to connect with other like-minded innovators, learn from their experiences, and explore potential collaborations. Our vision is to scale using a community-based approach and being part of the MIT Solve community will help us develop models and practices to do so. 
  5. Funding and Support: MIT Solve offers funding and support to selected solutions, which can be invaluable in scaling and implementing the game platform. Funding can help cover research and global outreach initiatives. Additionally, the support provided by MIT Solve, including mentorship, networking opportunities, and access to a global community of innovators, can greatly enhance the platform's success.

Overall, we are applying to MIT Solve as a platform to create opportunities for us to network with like-minded people, create partnerships, increase reach, and scale impact.

In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?

  • Monitoring & Evaluation (e.g. collecting/using data, measuring impact)
  • Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Sreeja Iyer

More About Your Solution

What makes your solution innovative?

The solution is innovative due to its unique approach to addressing the problem of developing 21st-century skills and fostering awareness of global challenges among children aged 6-16 years. Here's how it stands out:

  1. 21st-Century Skills Learning Pathways - The pathway within a game flow has been designed to make children's personal connections and ideas about large global problems visible and enable learning through contextual knowledge sharing, peer evaluation, and discussions to arrive at a collaborative shared understanding of the problem and propose solutions. The flow of a sprint includes children experiencing the problem deeply through visualization, making connections, wondering, and reimagining solutions in a variety of ways to solve large global problems. 
  2. Interactive Game-Based Learning - One of the challenges with 21st-century skills is making children's thinking visible and hence, the process of learning visible. The game-based platform not only achieves that but also provides feedback in real-time on areas that children could work on. It also gives the facilitator (with support from the game system) to scaffold learning in real time. The game scoring is based on the rubrics for creative thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration, and as children work towards increasing their scores in the gameplay it directly measures the improvements in their skills and knowledge. 
  3. Collaboration and Social Impact - As part of the game flow children work on collaboratively bringing together all their ideas in a small group to express their collective understanding and over several game sprints, the knowledge and skill building culminates in the form of outputs that can create impact.   
  4. Evolutionary Problem-Based Approach - Children working individually and in small groups in every gameplay on an incremental component of a large global challenge that they work on contextualizing for themselves and their community's challenges is a unique feature of the platform. It serves the dual role of providing the purpose and the knowledge base for skill development. The problems presented on the platform can evolve to keep pace with changes or contextualize specific problems faced by children across the world. 
  5. Communities of Change - Outside of live play children belong to their respective missions that meet weekly as part of Whole Mission Connect (WMC) in offline or hybrid modes to discuss challenges, implement mission-wide initiatives, launch ventures, share resources, document impact created, and encourage new ideas. 
  6. Scalability and Accessibility: The platform has the potential to reach a wide audience globally, transcending geographical boundaries and making the solution accessible to children worldwide. Groups of children can choose to type in other own languages into the platform (not restricted to English). While right now, it is not yet serving children from neo-literate or illiterate backgrounds but with speech-to-text options, we can make that possible too.
  7. Market Transformation: As more parents, children, and educators embrace such platforms, it could catalyze a shift towards a generation of aware changemakers who have spaces they learn and belong to for the rest of their lives, transforming how education is perceived and the purpose of learning.

What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?

1. Developing 21st-century skills 

The World Economic Forum’s ‘New Vision for Education (1) and the Global Partnership for Education’s report on 21st-century skills (2) mention that 21st-century skills include foundational literacies, competencies and character qualities. Of these, our goal is to develop all the competencies (critical thinking/problem solving, creativity, communication, and collaboration) as well as the qualities (curiosity, initiative, persistence/grit, adaptability, leadership, and social and cultural awareness). 

Within one year, it is our goal to reach 10,000 children and create and measure statistically significant shifts in the competencies through personal, local, and contextual problems connected to global problems and challenges like climate change, child rights, health & nutrition, and building empowered communities. 

Over 5 years, the platform aims to serve 3M children and will have a community of children who are developing and implementing new ideas, solutions, and systems as innovators and changemakers by addressing global problems. We believe that this is a consolidation of 21st-century skills for addressing real-world global challenges. 

2. Educating for Sustainable Development

As mentioned in the problem statement, Target 4.7 of the UN SDGs will consider how much global citizenship education and education for sustainable development has been mainstreamed in policies, curricula, teacher education, and student assessment. It is our goal in 5 years and beyond to be able to mainstream quality and measurable education for the same. The platform, by streamlining skill development over a contextual knowledge base and problem-solving missions, along with the Facilitator Dashboard for support and training, will be able to provide an integrated approach to mainstreaming education for sustainable development. 

The thematic indicator 4.7.4 is - Percentage of students by age group (or education level) showing adequate understanding of issues relating to global citizenship and sustainability. 

Within one year, it is our goal to deliver relevant knowledge to address global challenges, such as climate change, child rights, health & nutrition, building empowered communities/ human rights that develop active global citizenship through the game-play on the platform and work towards the achievement of this goal. 

3. Fostering Communities of Change amongst Children

We believe that civic action and change-making require community-based interventions. Therefore, establishing active communities of change is a very important part of the platform. 

Currently, each of the 4 ‘Missions’ (global challenges) that the platform is based on, has a community of children at the organization’s K-12 school. Through the platform, we will extend these communities, through systemic and pre-designed avenues for exchanging ideas and showcasing the impact each community has created. 

Additionally, we have realized the communities need to include collaborators who are practitioners and/or experts on the subjects. Thus, one of the sub-goals in building communities is to also have more partnerships to include such collaborators in each of the communities. 

Within 5 years, we envision that community members will be initiating Contextual Communities of Change. These could be of various types based on the organic needs that emerge as children work on global challenges. 

References:

  1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/21st-century-skills-future-jobs-students/

  2. https://www.globalpartnership....

Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?

  • 3. Good Health and Well-being
  • 4. Quality Education
  • 5. Gender Equality
  • 6. Clean Water and Sanitation
  • 7. Affordable and Clean Energy
  • 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • 12. Responsible Consumption and Production
  • 13. Climate Action
  • 14. Life Below Water
  • 15. Life on Land
  • 16. Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?

Measuring the impact of the work done on the platform is very important to us. This is one of the reasons the platform uses game-based learning, as the scores (feedback) are live and immediate - hence the immediate impact of a skill learned or knowledge acquired can be seen. Since the mechanics of the gameplay are designed using rubrics that pertain to 21st-century skills, over time the game scores themselves are a good indicator of the impact on an individual child. 

Additionally, we have referred to Ashoka University's framework(1) on Levels of Impact and Impact Stairway as one of the frameworks to set impact indicators that measure not only output but also outcome (behavior, life situation, and societal change). 

Here are the specific indicators we will use to measure the progress toward each of our goals. 

Goal 1 (Developing 21st-Century Skills) Indicators: 

  1. Number of children reached through the platform
  2. Student performance on skill assessments based on rubrics before, during, and after game sprints
  3. Number of innovative ideas and solutions developed by students using the platform
  4. Gathering student and parent feedback on the visible skill shifts in the student
  5. Evidence of student's skill application in real-world settings by tracking campaigns launched, funds raised, talks presented, behavior shifts, drives participated in
  6. Evidence of successful entrepreneurship ventures launched by students who have used the platform

Goal 2 (Educating for Sustainable development) Indicators:

  1. Measuring the increase in knowledge amongst students towards global challenges (current state, available solutions, etc.)
  2. Student portfolios showcasing various individual and teams outputs toward global challenges
  3. Number of external organizations using the platform (Government, Non-Government, Private)
  4. Number of students who have indicated they will pursue careers in sustainability or related fields
  5. Students' levels of empowerment to address global challenges through the platform

Goal 3 (Fostering Communities of Change amongst Children) Indicators: 

  1. Number of children in each of the mission communities
  2. Number of community engagements conducted
  3. Number of collaborative projects worked upon with external agencies by the missions
  4. Number of communities of change initiated by the community members
  5. Number of children who continue to participate and contribute to the mission communities beyond the tenure of the program on the platform


1. https://www.ashoka.org/en-in/s...

What is your theory of change?

The theories of change for building a 21st-century skill development game-based platform is as follows: 

The Discovery of Purpose in Children

Activities: Children are engaged in a large global challenge on a game-based platform. Children work on discovering their personal connections and ideas with the global challenge by themselves and go on to collaborate in small groups to bring together these ideas in further stages of the game. 

As they go on the journey the game principles (based on the Institute of Play's 7 Game Design Principles) ensure it feels like play, learning happens by doing, failure is framed as iteration, the challenge is constant, feedback is immediate, and ongoing and the space feels horizontal and collaborative as the group proceeds together towards a common goal. 

Outputs: On the platform, children produce presentations, talks, poetry, infographics, idea maps, posters, etc in groups and share with the larger community of children. As they gain mastery children create a portfolio of meaningful work that can speak for intent and the effort that they have put in as well as the level of knowledge and skills developed in the different global challenges. 

Children also gain knowledge and awareness about global challenges as well as develop 21st-century skills like creative thinking, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration in the process. This also leads to higher academic achievements and performances as children gain knowledge, skills, resilience, and confidence in their own abilities. 

Short-Term Outcomes: Children who develop the knowledge and skills to tackle global challenges feel empowered to take positive action in their own personal lives, communities, and the world which gets added to their portfolio of meaningful work on an ongoing basis. 

Long-Term Outcomes: This can lead to student-led communities of change and a sense of purpose for each of the children who participate and contribute to the missions on the platform.

Facilitators as Learners and Co-Agents of Change

Activities: As children are presented with large global challenges in a game-based manner the facilitators experience excited and engaged learners in action.

Outputs: As game scores are available live and over time it shows the knowledge and skill levels of children on an ongoing basis to the facilitators enabling effective monitoring and progress tracking. 

The game also enables effective and constant level-appropriate peer grouping, showcasing a variety of possibilities and opportunities to level up for different kinds of learners making it a high-tech, high-touch platform for the facilitators. 

Short-Term Outcomes: Creates opportunities for constant learning, upskilling, and self-growth when working on large, complex global issues as well as 21st-century skills. As scaffolds are provided for interactions, observations, and assessments through technology including the AI models the facilitation process becomes a joyous experience.  

Long-Term Outcomes: As the platform makes children's thinking visible, their voices heard and their sense of agency activates through acts of change-making, it creates a space for more meaningful engagements with children and with other like-minded communities of educators creating a sense of fulfillment and purpose in the work for the facilitators. 

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

The core technology that powers Wizets is a web application. The students interact with a graphical frontend to build a mind-map of their ideas. The students' ideas and their interconnections are represented as a graph. The user actions are supported by a scalable RESTful API at the backend, which stores the generated data in a NoSQL document database.

The backend also provides a web-socket server which enables live updates to be sent between users. The facilitators can view the students' responses and communicate with them in real time. The students collaborate using the live updates to combine their ideas in a convergent manner. The students' collaboration is captured in the form of new nodes and edges that link their individual mind-map graphs. Finally, the students use a custom-built presentation tool to import their ideas and transform them visually.

Going ahead, we intend to use Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to track student responses and to identify unique ideas that come up in each game.

Which of the following categories best describes your solution?

A new application of an existing technology

Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:

  • Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
  • Audiovisual Media
  • Software and Mobile Applications

In which countries do you currently operate?

  • India

In which countries will you be operating within the next year?

  • India
Your Team

What type of organization is your solution team?

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

How many people work on your solution team?

12

How long have you been working on your solution?

2 years

What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?

At Sparkling Mindz Global and WIZETS, we believe in a horizontal model of leadership and team building. This means that we do no follow a traditional hierarchical structure of operating; every individual has equitable rights and opportunities and is provided with the suitable training and mentoring required.

Currently, our team includes members from different cultural and educational backgrounds, including the Sciences (engineering, biotechnology, software engineering), Liberal Arts (economics, sociology, education) as well as Business Administration. 

In terms of the range of experience also the team is diverse: some are freshers, some have years of corporate experience, etc. Culturally, the team is composed of people from various regions in the country such as Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the South, and Uttar Pradesh in the North, as well as different ethnic, socio-economic, and linguistic backgrounds with a majority of women as facilitators of change. 

Following are the organization's core principles that pertain to diversity, equity, and inclusion: 

1. Based on the organization's value of empathy we don't discriminate based on race, caste, creed, cultural origins, educational background, physical/mental health conditions, color, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, genetic information

2. There is orientation and training provided to train the team on the required skills to work with children in a culturally-aligned manner

3. Every application is considered on the candidates' intent to work on a change-making platform and any relevant skills being presented irrespective of their prior work experience or educational qualification 

In terms of processes followed at school, below are some key points on how we make sure it is an inclusive space:

1. Training and team meetings are predominantly in English but also make use of Hindi and other language references wherever possible to bridge any gap in understanding due to a language barrier. 

2. There is an open and transparent system of giving and receiving feedback - which is based on a process and framework to eliminate any bias. 

3. The organization is a secular space, in which there is space for different kinds of cultural and religious beliefs to co-exist and also be celebrated from time to time, with an explicit choice to participate or not.

In the future, we are excited to onboard a lot more women who have had to step out of the workforce due to maternity or other life circumstances and train and upskill them to become facilitators of change. The platform aims to provide them with a sense of belonging to a like-minded community while building a life of meaning together. This is a possible ambition given the global and decentralized nature of the platform. 

Your Business Model & Funding

What is your business model?

Here's the business model for the Wizets Platform.

  1. Revenue streams: The platform can generate revenue through multiple streams as mentioned below:

    • Subscription model: Users pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee to access the platform's games and resources.

    • Licensing: Tying up with schools or non-Governmental organizations  through a license fee to serve larger learning communities

  2. Cost structure: The cost structure of the platform will mainly involve:

    • Design Costs: UX and UI elements needed to make the platform child-friendly and seamless to play will require iterative design

    • Development Costs: The platform will require ongoing development to maintain and improve its features and functionality.

    • Data Server, Storage, and Hosting Costs: Cloud servers, File storage, and Database server costs as well as analytics, AI/ML, data governance, and compliance costs at scale.

    • Facilitator Fee: When the game is run synchronously a facilitator will be hosting the game for the student groups to work in tandem. Facilitators are paid a fee for every session they host. 

    • Community-Building costs: Reaching out and conducting events for building communities of like-minded parents, educators, and organizations. 

  3. Key partners: The platform can partner with various organizations or entities, such as:

    • Mission Mentors: Organizations and people working in areas related to the change-making missions for providing feedback on the curriculum, identifying specific projects, imparting knowledge or skills, and being part of a prosocial careers network on the platform. 

    • Educational institutions: Schools and other educational organizations can partner with the platform to offer access to the games as part of their curriculum and teacher training process through subscription or licensing fees.

    • Non-Governmental Organizations: NGOs providing education-related services can partner with the platform via licensing to build skill-building programs.

    • Governmental Organizations: Government initiatives in India and other countries related to focus on developing 21st-century skills in children can partner with the platform on a licensing basis

    • International Agencies: UNESCO, World Bank, UNICEF, and OECD, etc. can partner with the platform to provide game-based learning of 21st-century skills based on global challenges to children and teachers across the world

  4. Key activities: The key activities of the platform will include:

    • Community Building: Children and facilitators from across the world will connect to implement the learning on the ground in local communities and at scale. Also, creating awareness amongst parents and educators about building 21st-century skills in children through real-life problems that impact all of us today. 

    • Ongoing design and development of game flow through iterative feedback loops, making the gameplay independent and asynchronous for access by individuals and remote locations, using AI/ML models to improve the quality of access, and maintaining the platform's games and resources.

    • Facilitator Training - Providing training and mentorship to the facilitators who host the games 

  5. Value proposition: The platform's value proposition will be centered around:

    • Providing a fun, engaging, and effective way for children (6-16 years) to develop essential 21st-century skills 

    • Offering a safe and secure environment for children to learn and interact with other like-minded learners and educators from around the world through the context of global problems

Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?

Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)

What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?

Currently, the K12 school as a parent organization has funded the development of the idea and the platform. 

The larger vision for the platform is derived from an afterschool program, focused on developing thinking, emotional, and communication skills in children (6-16 years), that the K12 school founder has run for the past 12 years in an offline mode. The concept of global problems and challenges as the base for the platform came from the change-making missions that currently run at the K12 schools in an offline mode. 

The Wizets platform is an attempt to scale the wisdom of the past decade to reach more students in an effective manner. 

Subscription and licensing are the ways that the platform will fund its work once the platform is launched. Any additional funds raised in the form of grants or venture capital will go towards scaling faster by building communities and more features on the existing platform to reach out to more children.

Share some examples of how your plan to achieve financial sustainability has been successful so far.

Currently, the platform is funded by the parent organization, the K-12 school, and is planning an online launch under the brand name Wizets in mid-July. With the current funding available we can scale up to 10,000 children on our own. The subscriptions and licensing fees will also kick in and enable further growth. 

Post-launch, we are looking to raise venture capital for rapid growth toward other geographical regions and CSR funds that can support wider reach through licensing to non-government agencies for skill-building.

Solution Team

 
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