Doyobi

• Over the next decade, a billion youths will enter the workforce into jobs that don’t exist today. Educators are tasked to bridge the gap between what’s taught in classrooms and jobs of the future. OECD has highlighted the discrepancies between today’s curriculum and the diverse needs of preparing students for the future. 
• Doyobi develops content delivered on a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with built-in learning tools. By integrating STEM content with learning and teaching tools, we upskill teachers to deliver engaging STEM curriculum. Longer term, we want to add 21st century (21C) skills content to the VLE and build a student engagement toolkit to help teachers deliver engaging lessons that help learners develop 21C skills.
• If scaled globally, Doyobi will upskill millions of teachers and fill the 21C skills gap in schools. UNESCO estimates we need 70 million new teachers worldwide by 2030 to meet SDG education goals.

In a RAND Corporation survey of a sample size of 1,000 former public-school teachers, three of four former teachers were often or always stressed. In the UK, 500,000 teachers have left the teaching profession. Studies found that stress was the leading reason teachers quit pre-pandemic, and COVID-19 exacerbated it. Education was already in a crisis pre-COVID because education systems are slow to adapt to rapid changes brought about by technology. We conducted focus-group discussions and in-depth interviews with teachers and found that teachers want to teach STEM subjects but are struggling to get started. One of our interviewees mentioned that she has to “deal with the demands of the existing curriculum while managing change”. 

Doyobi creates content and tools to empower teachers with little or no prior STEM experience to teach STEM subjects. Beyond STEM, we introduce teachers to new pedagogical approaches incorporating SEL and inquiry-based learning. We believe teachers who feel empowered and supported are more motivated, leading to increased student engagement and decreased teacher attrition.

• Doyobi provides teachers a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with easy-to-use classroom engagement tools. The VLE hosts self-paced courses to help teachers upskill themselves, as well as STEM curriculum that significantly reduces the burden on teachers of delivering STEM lessons.  
  

• The STEM curriculum developed by Doyobi consists of videos, games and quizzes to make learning engaging and interactive. Teachers can track each student’s progress in real-time.

• Teachers need not spend hours on lesson planning and content sourcing. Every activity on the VLE comes with teacher notes that help teachers with facilitation and student discussions. The VLE allows for guided independent work and group discussions. It can be used in physical, online or hybrid classrooms. 

Doyobi's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) serves teachers and learners. We have spoken to over 100 educators and we have designed the VLE with teachers in mind. Teachers in both public and private schools are under pressure to teach STEM subjects, but they do not have the time or bandwidth to learn these STEM subjects themselves. In Thailand for example, home economics teachers are expected to teach coding with minimal training. 

Doyobi's VLE is being used by 19 organisations in 10 countries, with about 50 teachers teaching on the VLE. We are in constant dialogue with these teachers via surveys, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews. We asked teachers with no coding background how confident they are teaching coding after going through a self-paced course on the VLE and a 2 hour online training session. On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the most confident, no teacher expressed a confidence level less than 4.

Teachers play a central role in delivering learning outcomes, but ultimately education is in service of learners. Many students are disengaged because education today is still based on rote-learning to pass standardised tests. Doyobi improves student engagement through a combination of interactive content integrated with learning tools, delivered on Doyobi's VLE. 

In a survey of 130 students who learnt science on Doyobi’s VLE, the percentage of students who “very much enjoy learning science” increased from just under 40% pre-Doyobi to over 60% post-Doyobi. 

One teacher said during a teacher interview “... what I liked about the Doyobi classes is that it was very interactive for the students, so they had small components where they would click through and learn about things on their own so it makes students take charge of their own learning.”  

Doyobi's VLE empowers teachers to teach STEM subjects and upskills them to incorporate SEL and inquiry-based learning in the classroom. On the teacher dashboard, teachers are able to track each student’s progress in real-time, which allows for early intervention to support individual students. The different teaching modes on the VLE allows for group discussions and independent learning. In self-paced mode, students are not held back when the teacher is supporting other learners. Every student gets his own account on the VLE and is therefore able to show parents his or her progress and project portfolio.

Doyobi’s Virtual Learning Environment is currently used by just under 1,000 students and about 50 teachers in 10 countries. We license the VLE to schools, enrichment centres, non-profits and freelance instructors on a cost per student basis. Hear from our licensee in Indonesia and India. 

In the Philippines, we helped a group of 6 out-of-work swim coaches with no coding experience upskill to become coding instructors, providing them with a new livelihood. In less than 6 months, this small group of teachers has 110 students learning coding with them. 

Doyobi’s goal is to be the 21st Century Skills framework used by every school, but we are starting with STEM because that solves an immediate need for schools. Our first curriculum integrates coding and science, which makes science lessons much more engaging. Instead of reading off a science textbook, students play games on Scratch, participate in quizzes, and build their own Scratch project based on the science topic they are learning. Not only does science become more fun and relatable, students also pick up coding skills and get the opportunity for creative self-expression. Longer-term when we have a large number of schools, teachers and learners using our VLE, we can introduce content that’s much more focused on 21C skills e.g. critical thinking, collaboration etc. 

Doyobi's curricula, learning tools and VLE are all designed with teachers in mind. Many edtech startups are building products for learners going direct to families. Our approach is to build products to helping teachers be better at what they do. We hope more edtech companies will build for teachers rather than replace teachers. We believe teaching is one of the hardest roles to replace and one of the last jobs to be replaced by AI.   

Since launching in August 2020 we’ve onboarded 19 partners from 10 countries, with a total of 47 teachers. The smallest class includes 3 students, and the largest class includes 25 students. Currently, just under 1,000 students have experienced learning on Doyobi’s VLE. We expect to reach 20,000 learners in one year, 2 million students in five years. Doyobi’s model is licensing to schools, going where students are. This makes it a lot more scalable than a B2C model going direct to families/ learners.

We are measuring impact through quantitative metrics such as number of teachers and users using the VLE, and teacher and student feedback. As an example, a survey of 130 students pre and post-learning with Doyobi’s VLE indicated that the percentage of students who “very much enjoy learning science” increased from just under 40% to over 60%. An example of qualitative feedback from a student Jeremy, age 11. “I think that it's way better because in normal science, I am just reading words off textbooks/worksheets, but with Doyobi you can turn the knowledge into animations and stories. It makes you want to do more coding and also, more science."

Beyond STEM education, the longer term goal is  to solve SDG 4 Quality Education, in particular Target 4.4 - increasing the number of youth who have relevant skills for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship. Again, we refer to the OECD quote about “the discrepancies between today’s curriculum and the diverse needs of preparing students for the future.” 

19 full-time staff and 2 interns

Doyobi is a spin-off from Saturday Kids, one of the largest education-focused social enterprises in Singapore. Besides Code In The Community, Saturday Kids has also run coding programmes in Cambodia for public school children funded by USAID. Half the Doyobi team came from Saturday Kids. Doyobi (and Saturday Kids) founder is an Obama Leader and Ashoka Changemaker. Through leadership and capacity building programmes offered by the Obama Foundation and Ashoka, Doyobi’s founder deeply understands the importance of solving SDG4 - Quality Education for all. Doyobi’s founder and Doyobi’s head of product/co-founder are both Transcend Fellows, a network of founders building the future of work and learning. 

Doyobi is a spin-off from Saturday Kids. The Saturday Kids team of 25 people in Singapore and Japan is 80% female. The management team is 100% female (Saturday Kids’ founder is non-executive). Saturday Kids is deeply committed to gender equity. At the time of submitting this proposal, we are in the final stage of The Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls. Half the Doyobi team came from Saturday Kids. As such, Doyobi shares a similar ethos as Saturday Kids. The leadership team is 50% female. Beyond gender equity, the greater goal is for Doyobi to play a major role in solving SDG 4 - Quality Education for All.

Having participated in the Obama Leaders programme (Doyobi’s founder is top 15% of his cohort), the Ashoka Changemaker programme and the Transcend Fellowship, Doyobi’s founder deeply understands the value of being part of a community of changemakers. Every community offers something different and allows members to tap on new resources and build new networks. Just as importantly, Doyobi and its founding team is able to offer something to every community it is a part of. With the Obama Foundation, we coordinate the efforts of Obama Leaders in education across Asia-Pacific and Singapore. With Ashoka, we evangelise the importance of creating deep systemic impact. With Transcend, we introduce Edtech founders to the network and to Edtech investors.

Solve’s mission to solve world problems is everything Doyobi stands for. Doyobi’s mission is to help school leaders nurture future-ready students who can exercise agency, become changemakers, and create positive impact in the world. Excerpt from an essay Doyobi’s founder wrote. “Our generation is not going to solve all of these problems. It is up to our kids and the generation(s) after them to come up with the solutions that will ensure humanity continues to thrive.” Nurturing changemakers is hard. Being part of the Solve community makes it easier. 

Doyobi’s vision is to be the 21st Century Skills framework used by every school. To get there, we need advice and mentorship from experts on education and social change. We need help getting the Doyobi product into more schools. We need more awareness of what we stand for, what we offer, and why schools should work with us.

In addition, we believe there are already many individuals and organisations creating great content related to 21st Century Skills. We want to partner them to surface their work to school leaders and allow as many learners as possible to benefit from the content they have created.

Saturday Kids and Doyobi are both deeply influenced by the work Mitch Resnick and his team do at The Lifelong Kindergarten group within MIT Media Lab. Mitch’s book ‘Lifelong Kindergarten’ has had a profound impact on how we think about creativity and learning through play. Saturday Kids is probably the biggest proponent of play-based learning in Singapore. Doyobi’s focus on creating engagement in the classroom in order to make learning fun for students is an extension of Saturday Kids’ work on play-based learning. Engaged learners are better learners. We believe that when learners are engaged, that’s 80% of the teacher’s job done. The Doyobi team would love to collaborate with the Lifelong Kindergarten group, specifically around learner engagement.

• Doyobi provides teachers a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with easy-to-use classroom engagement tools. The VLE hosts self-paced courses to help teachers upskill themselves, as well as STEM curriculum that significantly reduces the burden on teachers of delivering STEM lessons.  
  

• The STEM curriculum developed by Doyobi consists of videos, games and quizzes to make learning engaging and interactive. Teachers can track each student’s progress in real-time.

• Teachers need not spend hours on lesson planning and content sourcing. Every activity on the VLE comes with teacher notes that help teachers with facilitation and student discussions. The VLE allows for guided independent work and group discussions. It can be used in physical, online or hybrid classrooms. 

• Doyobi provides teachers a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with easy-to-use classroom engagement tools. The VLE hosts self-paced courses to help teachers upskill themselves, as well as STEM curriculum that significantly reduces the burden on teachers of delivering STEM lessons.  
  

• The STEM curriculum developed by Doyobi consists of videos, games and quizzes to make learning engaging and interactive. Teachers can track each student’s progress in real-time.

• Teachers need not spend hours on lesson planning and content sourcing. Every activity on the VLE comes with teacher notes that help teachers with facilitation and student discussions. The VLE allows for guided independent work and group discussions. It can be used in physical, online or hybrid classrooms. 

Doyobi is a spin-off from Saturday Kids. The Saturday Kids team of 25 people in Singapore and Japan is 80% female. The management team is 100% female (Saturday Kids’ founder is non-executive). Saturday Kids is deeply committed to gender equity. At the time of submitting this proposal, we are in the final stage of The Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls. Half the Doyobi team came from Saturday Kids. As such, Doyobi shares a similar ethos as Saturday Kids. The leadership team is 50% female. Beyond gender equity, the greater goal is for Doyobi to play a major role in solving SDG 4 - Quality Education for All.

• Doyobi provides teachers a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with easy-to-use classroom engagement tools. The VLE hosts self-paced courses to help teachers upskill themselves, as well as STEM curriculum that significantly reduces the burden on teachers of delivering STEM lessons.  

• The STEM curriculum developed by Doyobi consists of videos, games and quizzes to make learning engaging and interactive. Teachers can track each student’s progress in real-time.

• Teachers need not spend hours on lesson planning and content sourcing. Every activity on the VLE comes with teacher notes that help teachers with facilitation and student discussions. The VLE allows for guided independent work and group discussions. It can be used in physical, online or hybrid classrooms. 

• Doyobi provides teachers a web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) with easy-to-use classroom engagement tools. The VLE hosts self-paced courses to help teachers upskill themselves, as well as STEM curriculum that significantly reduces the burden on teachers of delivering STEM lessons.  
  
  

• The STEM curriculum developed by Doyobi consists of videos, games and quizzes to make learning engaging and interactive. Teachers can track each student’s progress in real-time.

• Teachers need not spend hours on lesson planning and content sourcing. Every activity on the VLE comes with teacher notes that help teachers with facilitation and student discussions. The VLE allows for guided independent work and group discussions. It can be used in physical, online or hybrid classrooms.