A2 Lifelong Learning Platform, from A2Makers

In the 21st century, knowledge is the foundation of success for entrepreneurs and professionals alike. Inhabitants of disadvantaged communities hardly have time or opportunity to hone their own knowledge, either because they don’t have money nor time to pay for complementary training or because they simply don't know where to find the knowledge required for a promotion or a (better) job. 

The A2 Platform provides a new and alternative learning model to teach entrepreneurial, technical and soft skills, based on psychology, AI, microlearning and gamification. It is a light and free app that provides equitable access to learning regardless of location, income, or connectivity. A2’s purpose is to provide a way for people to develop their professional skills everyday, everywhere, using every minute available. It is the ‘Duolingo’ of 21st-century skills, preparing people to get higher paying jobs and matching them with interested companies.

In the 21st century, knowledge is the base for success for entrepreneurs and professionals. How can we provide the essential knowledge to inhabitants of disadvantaged communities in order to offer more opportunities for work and entrepreneurship? In Brazil alone, before the Covid-19’s outbreak, more than 40% (38 millions) of workers were informal, and more than 12 million people were looking for a job. This number should increase dramatically after the pandemic’s resolution. 

Latin America is losing world’s market share in modern products and services, especially in the technology sector. In the last decades, it has become almost solely a  basic commodities supplier (food and minerals). One of the reasons is because available workers are not prepared to operate in modern technological companies.

With the rise of Industry 4.0 and related technologies, these problems will become even worse: companies can not increase without having prepared workers available in the market and workers without proper knowledge will not find a job. We mean to solve these issues with the A2 platform, which will provide free access to high quality content required to operate in the IT and I4.0 environments, leveraging the capabilities of Latin America as a whole.

A2 Platform aims to improve the life of people that need a job or an improvement in their career, but do not have time, money and infrastructure to acquire new professional knowledge and abilities. It also supports companies that are looking for professionals with specific skills to be part of their team. It is a multi sided platform that on one hand teaches workers with 21st-century skills and on the other connects engaged learners with interested companies.  For the professional target audience, we are aiming at recently graduated students, young professionals looking for better job opportunities and more seasoned workers looking to hone their skills and maybe change career paths. For the company side, we are looking into medium to big sized companies that need more qualified workers, as well as people engaged with their core values. 

A2Makers, the startup which is creating the solution, is interacting with typical users in order to identify how it can offer them opportunities to develop as professionals in a new and engaging way. A2Makers is also conducting interviews and discussions with the HR department of modern big companies, mapping their needs. 

In the 21st century, knowledge is the foundation of success for entrepreneurs and professionals alike. Inhabitants of disadvantaged communities hardly have time or opportunity to hone their own knowledge, either because they don’t have money nor time to pay for complementary training or because they simply don't know where to find the knowledge required for a promotion or a (better) job. 

The A2 Platform provides a new and alternative learning model to teach entrepreneurial, technical and soft skills. It is a light and free app that provides equitable access to learning regardless of location, income, or connectivity. A2’s purpose is to provide a way for people to develop their professional skills everyday, everywhere, using every minute available. It is the ‘Duolingo’ of 21st-century skills, preparing people to get higher paying jobs and matching them with interested companies.

The learning model itself is based on the psychology of learning, AI, gamification and extensive use of microlearning techniques. We are doing extensive academic research on these topics, focusing on developing a unique methodology that draws from game mechanics to actively make users enter the flow state required for maximum knowledge acquisition. This new approach is required for attracting users to the app and make them use it on a daily basis, and it is the main advantage in comparison to traditional MOOC environments. This methodology is being led by two people: Marcos Borges, PhD (myself), a professor at University of Campinas (UNICAMP), with extensive knowledge on the use of technologies for education, creative learning and computational thinking; and Gabriel Natucci, MsC, a PhD candidate at University of Campinas (UNICAMP) with extensive knowledge on AI, app design and development and gamification.Both of us have also worked in multinational companies before, with projects in Latin America (Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Peru), Germany and the US (Silicon Valley and Boston Area)

 The platform is currently being developed with React.JS and Ionic, aimed at creating a Progressive Web App (PWA) that can be accessed through the web and published to major mobile stores (App Store and Google Play). The learning contents are being developed by myself, and are targeting skills such as leadership and digital presence, creativity, technology design (programming, AI, design thinking), problem solving and emotional stability.

The platform also has a web-only feature devised for companies to look into learner’s profiles, looking for their overall skill score and for possible hires.

The A2 Platform is a light and free app that provides a new and

alternative learning model to teach entrepreneurial, technical and
soft skills, based on psychology, AI, microlearning and gamification.
Companies like Duolingo, Memrise and SoloLearn try to support
learning using a free use app with microlearning and/or gamification,
but they are all focused on a specific content, such as foreign
languages or programming. Our approach is innovative and different
compared to those solutions because we focus on 21st-century
skills, like creativity, problem solving, resilience and computational
thinking, rather than specific content that can only be applied in
certain contexts.
Also, the A2 solution aims to give people knowledge to get better
jobs or even start their own entrepreneurship journey, offering a
unique possibility to disadvantaged communities; coupled with this
concept, we provide an AI algorithm that matches company jobs
with interested professionals, guaranteeing that our users will have
access to better job opportunities. Another different aspect of our
solution is precisely the company-side of the platform, where
managers can look up learner profiles,post job offers, and even
create company-themed challenges for users to tackle, in the hopes
of finding the right professional for job openings.

Finally, the platform also goes deeper into the psychology of
learning and game mechanics to make our users even more
engaged in learning. Rather than simply establishing a badge-
reward system, like the traditional learning apps, we will go one step
further and create a character-based system, inspired by RPG-type
games.

It is unusual for the disadvantaged community's population to worry about preparing themselves for more abstract abilities like communication, leadership and entrepreneurship. But these abilities will be the most important ones in a future where continuous and fast change is the only sure and where technical knowledge can be easily learned from free courses and contents available on the internet. 

A2 Platform intends to offer small activities based on microlearning that will deal with this kind of challenges without using this usual and difficult terminology. A2 Platform uses simple and easy to understand journeys and challenges, with the proposal of offering small and motivating activities, accessible to people coming from all backgrounds. The output will be the continuous improvement of the abilities of its users, having as short-term outcome professionals prepared for the new reality of companies. This new reality, according to the World’s Economic Forum latest research (https://www.weforum.org/report...), involves having professionals with creativity, problem solving and emotional intelligence skills, all of which the A2 platform will provide users to learn. In the long run, A2 platform will help Latin América’s economy to shift into technology-based products, services and solutions, by having better prepared professionals trained to design these technologies, lead diverse teams and with enough self-motivation and resilience to start their own businesses. 

The A2 Platform is currently in development by A2Makers, with at least 2 multinational companies interested in the solution. A2 Makers has already developed some training related to the 21st century abilities, attending the needs of some companies.

Our initial plan is serving about a hundred thousand users and a hundred companies in a year, starting from Brazil.  We intend to reach about 40-50 million users in five years in Brazil, centered in other portuguese and spanish speaking countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

A2Makers right now is being accelerated by a government-funded entrepreneurship department, and is developing its goals based on Agile and Lean startup methods. With that in mind, the goals in the next year can be consolidated in this topics:

1. Our first goal is to offer our app MVP, intended to be available in April of 2020.  

2. Validate the MVP and improve his functionalities in the first semester of 2020, reaching at least a thousand users

3. Having the first ten companies as customers of the Platform in the second semester of 2020, as well às reaching ten thousand users by then.

For the long-term, our main goal is to scale the solution to reach as many people as possible. For that, our goals are:

4. Receive external funding until the end of 2021

5. Offer the spanish version of platform in 2021

6. Scale the number of users (learners) in our platform, estimating at least 100.000 users by the end of 2021, and at least 100 companies in our platform looking for professionals

A2 Makers is, today, a two partner company without investors and capital. So, the barrier is having financial availability to create a group to help in the development and improvement of the platform and to propose the challenges. The learning strategy was already studied in experiences the partners developed before and the technology of the app is defined. The partners already map a team that can make the company accelerate its offerings. 

Another barrier A2 Makers will face in the future is related to languages and social cultures different from Brazil. That is why A2 Makers intends to, first, reach a recognition in Brazil and, after that, offer the A2 Platform in spanish, to Latin America and Caribbean spanish speakers countries, because the cultural differences with Brazil are smaller when comparing with other world regions. But even in Latin America and Caribbean countries, it will be a challenge to keep a closer contact with the users in order to evaluate how A2 Platform fits their expectations. 

A2 Makers partners have close connections to some startup investors groups in Brazil and in the startups community of the city of Campinas, an important technology hub in Brazil. The A2Makers team is, today, preparing to start the first strategic investments.The startup is under acceleration now and enrolling for the first investment pitches. 

A2 Makers intends to find a partner in a spanish speaker country in order to support the translation of the tool, as well as help with any cultural differences that may arise.

A2 Platform can be used for all countries where people are trying to prepare themselves for the work reality in the 21st century, specially in countries with small medium income such as Latin America/Caribbean. But, it is essential to the success of the platform to customize the journeys and challenges to the language and culture of the users. And the method of this customization is based on a closer interaction with the typical users, in collaborative design activities. So, we will need to find a partner in some spanish speaker country at most by the end of 2020, so that the solution will scale properly to spanish speaking countries. Based on statistics coming from other learning apps such as Duolingo and Udemy, we expect a user base of more than 300 million in Latin America alone 

Today, A2Makers is based on its two initial partners: one working full-time in building the solution and the other working part-time (since he is a professor part-time in the best university of Brazil).

A2 Makers is a one year old startup. But the two partners already worked together in the past for five years. And along the last decade, both of them prepare themselves to the A2 Platform challenge:

• Gabriel Natucci worked for 5 years in the innovation team of Bosch, where he developed dozens of projects involving AI, IoT and app development for various applications, from manufacturing to farming and cattle breeding in Latin America. He has worked in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Germany and the US (Silicon Valley) providing these solutions. During this time, he also participated in the California Berkeley’s acceleration program, earning two prizes for his team’s smart agriculture solution. He developed his master degree in Electrical engineering and is a computer scientist bachelor. He has extensive knowledge in software development, AI, UI/UX, and analytics technology.

• Marcos Borges is PhD in computer science, awarded as the better brazilian PhD in computers in education in 2004. He is a part-time professor in University of Campinas, where he is the leader of a team that aims to create, apply and evaluate learning strategies based on technologies. Marcos is a member of Brazilian network of creative learning, offering free technology training based on voluntary work to the children of public based schools for about five years. He has extensive knowledge on the pedagogy, computational tools for learning and new learning practices. Marcos have also worked in partnership with the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten lab in the creative learning subject.  

We are currently talking with other local learning startups so that we can expand our reach, as well as some marketing companies in Latin America that can help advertise our solution to the right audiences.

A2 Platform key customers and beneficiaries are the inhabitants of disadvantaged communities that can use the platform to develop their professional and entrepreneurship abilities using the platform. For them the platform will effectively be an mobile-first app that provides journeys and challenges on 21st-century skills such as creativity and problem solving

On the other hand, the companies interested in finding professionals prepared for the challenges they are facing are the other interested parties. They will access the platform in an online manner, usually by using a web-first UI, that enables them to look up learner profiles, their interests and whether or not they are improving their skills. The company’s main interest in this case is hiring these learners. Companies can also have an active role and propose new learning challenges in the platform, by paying us a small fee for curating the challenge.

The inhabitants will receive the abilities and knowledge preparation. The companies will receive indications of professionals aligned to their needs, purpose and requirements for future jobs. For companies, the platform will be charged on a monthly basis (~US$100), while for the inhabitants the platform will be completely free with advertising, or can be acquired with a small one-time payment (~US$3) to use the platform without ads (the typical freemium model for mobile apps in IOS and Android devices)

A2Makers is looking for investments and donations in order to offer the MVP and the first set of challenges. Having the MVP and challenges, the A2 Platform will be offered free in Android and IOS stores. When A2 Platform reaches an interesting number of users, the companies interested in finding professionals prepared for the challenges they are facing will pay for accessing information of professionals using the platform, providing the income to support the A2 Platform team. Right now the team is focused on the MVP development and organic growth through company billing, but we are also pursuing external investors to accelerate and scale our solution in the long term.

A2 Platform’s success is hardly only connected with the number of users it reaches.  We aim to truly change the way learning occurs in underprivileged communities, and for that we need access to the latest research on learning, knowledge retention and motivation, as well as conducting experiments on how to best engage learners and prepare them for workplace challenges in the future. Based on this, the TPrize Challenge is essential for us in terms of the network provided with A-grade universities such as MIT. The financial support will also be critical, since we are starting a company with personal resources and need additional investment to accelerate the company. We also want to scale our solution as fast as possible, and we believe the TPrize challenge will provide the right network and contacts with investors to make this possible. The marketing TPrize will also help a long way on acquiring new users and scale the solution further.

A2 Platform is strongly based on academic research and latest developments in psychology and pedagogy. A2Makers intends to develop partnerships with academic teams working with 21st century skills, such as Unicamp, MIT, UC Berkeley, NYU and others.

We are looking for partners that can share research insights, and use our user base as a way to conduct learning experiments.