The Tech Academy

In general, we notice that children are disengaged from their classrooms and lessons. They study to pass the exam and then drain what they learnt. Meanwhile, kids continue to be addicted to video games and exhibit a greater interest in entertainment.

We gamify our Animation, Game Development, and Robotics lessons at The Tech Academy (TTA) so that students fall in love with learning and want to improve every day.  They are more connected in the lessons and desire to continue learning on their own. They voluntarily join our after-school programs without being pushed by their parents.

If we can scale up our developed solution internationally, more youngsters will be equipped with futuristic digital abilities, and learning will take on a whole new meaning throughout the world.

Our primary objective is to make learning more fun and engaging for students. According to our surveys a majority of students have been dissatisfied with their learning, especially online school classes. Those classes are not interactive or engaging. This leaves students unmotivated to learn and the current class models used by schools, especially in Bangladesh has left students not interested in their learning leading to slower pace and worse skills gained overall.

Additionally all fun activities like clubs have been all but completely halted and students have turned to YouTube and Netflix for fun rather than being productive.

Our solution involves restructuring class into a ‘Gamified Classroom’. The class design takes elements from video games and sports creating a more actively engaged classroom.

Our class involves 3 personnel as opposed to one. A Vocal artist whose job is to provide exciting commentary, a Class Coordinator who tracks the kids progress and scores, and a topic expert who coordinates with the other roles to provide a fun, engaging and fruitful learning experience. Instead of tests or exams our students do multiple challenges every class for which they receive points. We focus on teaching STEM topics, currently Robotics & Electronics, 3D Animation & CGI and Game Development.

We believe that with these future thinking topics, the students can have great future prospects.

Our solution serves children between age 8-15 who feel disinterested with traditional learning. This disinterest leads to students not wanting to learn. We want to change their learning experience into something fun just like an after school activity like martial arts. If children have fun in class and continue to engage like they do in a video game they grow to have a lot of practice and skills.

As of 2021 we have 180+ students in our Academy in Bangladesh. We have been working with our students very closely to develop a class model through which the students can learn through challenges and co-opetition with very positive feedback. Most students prefer TTA’s classes over their school/extra-curricular activity. We often hear parents say how we take time away from Netflix and YouTube as students are so engaged.

In our conventional teaching approach, we find 3 categorized students in a classroom:
1. Who understands everything;
2. Who doesn’t understand but gets inspired enough to learn on his own;
3. Who doesn’t get anything; neither learning nor motivation.

To nullify this unforeseen differentiation, to make the classroom more equitable and to ensure fun & engagement, we have designed our gamified strategies to teach them. In this way, our Academic Coordinators have found more than 95% engagement in classes and we are now aiming toward 100.

We chose growth because we have 80+ students directly enrolled into our academy and 100+ students  enrolled through B2B deals with schools in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

We have recently collaborated with Frobel Academy (a private school) to start a new branch in Chattogram, Bangladesh. We have a collaboration with The Learning Castle in Jakarta, Indonesia where we are doing pilot workshops. We have a partnership with Encinal Junior & Senior High School in San Francisco, USA and are currently in the process of setting up a full branch so we can directly provide our services to students.

As of our finding, there has not been any significant changes made in any part of the world to implement entertainment in teaching STEM education, precisely in teaching Animation, Game Development and Robotics.

Our solution is simple: Merge gamification with education. This approach makes lessons entertaining and easier to learn for the students, thus, everyone enjoys it and learns together at a similar pace. It is catalytic because it seeks more interest in the student and he starts to grow a habit of learning. It also welcomes other students to join and take part, which implies that anyone can start learning STEM at an early age regardless of any barrier.

Our current partner schools have already been inspired by how we teach their students and that’s how we are getting more B2B development opportunities in the market. In Bangladesh, The Tech Academy is the only one established institution teaching STEM to kids in this way, and we have already progressed to enter into the international market. 

• Our solution currently serves 180 students.
• In 12 months from now we plan to serve 300 student.
• In 5 years our plan is to have 3000 students in our community.

There are measuring scales of our platform with the number of students we have. But how do we measure our students’ engagement in the classroom? We measure how many messages students send in a class in the open chat. We measure how many students talk & how much one individual student talks, at which tone they sent the messages.

Another way we measure engagement in our class is students’ feedback and how quickly students submit challenges and their learning curve, and how many challenges they solve, how many questions they ask and how many kids they help. 

These are all the mechanisms metrics to measure engagement of a child during a class. 

We have 10 Full-time Employees, 5 Part-time Employees and 3 Interns.

The team is made up of very young individuals whom we consider to be change makers of the society.. We're trying to bring a big revolution in the local scene and very soon the global scene. They have made a lot of sacrifices in terms of career & life, to do something that is out of the convention. There are people in the team who have dropped out of college. There are people in the team who have let go of traditional professions to follow this. And they all have realized how the traditional school system isn’t enjoyable to students. They did not enjoy schooling or even university when they had it. 

This is how they are directly connected to the problem & serve the students by understanding the reactions of their students. When they see the students happy they feel more motivated. To work for this, We have a team built up of people who are educators, who understand education, people who understand psychology, people who understand Legal matters, financial matters, business Development & also managers marketing. 

We have the right people who are visionaries to move forward. We just need more and more people in the execution process so we can scale up. 

The Tech Academy has so far taught children in Bangladesh from different backgrounds. Whether they are students from international schools or whether their ethnic minority group, in the hill tracts, or whether their children from the slums or children from children that are considered street children, and women from slums. 

And we've done this for various projects. We have a very high ratio of girls to boys in Tech Academy in comparison to a lot of other technical Institutes. 

A lot of parents are understanding that coding, robotics and game development are not only for boys, but they're also for girls. Through doing this, we are making sure that we are inclusive and diverse. The equity trend teaches children for free to dive, in ethnic communities. 

Charging lower through programs when we collaborate with different NGOs. Our goal in the future is to provide scholarships and also reach out to third world countries. Our whole model is similar to a Robin Hood model where the money we make from The higher income communities or high-income countries, can be channeled to provide less costly or free education for the third world low income countries.

To us, an Equitable classroom is a classroom where everyone is noticed; included and in this era it's an online classroom. Where students are not just staring at a screen or doing something else because they're not engaging towards an Equitable classroom is also so that anybody from anywhere across the world can join our classes with the power of Technology with the device and internet. 

There was another question based on, how do you want to be too soon, the Robin Hood model when we raise funds from the higher income countries and try to channel that to low-income communities. One of the ways we will invest that money would also be to ensure devices and internet connectivity to people to kids who do not have access to that. We understand a lot of kids across the world cannot attain education in this COVID driven era because they don't have a device or Internet. So, we are someone who has been working to make the classroom Equitable, make the classroom inclusive and engaging. 

And having these categories, having the separate category in MIT Solve has really motivated us to apply.

We currently need help with the business model. Previously, we're trying to solve a very big problem with a very small team. But now the team needs to get bigger from professional & executives. Hence we need help in Human Resources in our team. We can ask for volunteers too from students to make the system more inclusive. For the inclusion of new team members, we need training & the right kind of people to align with the vision of the team. That’s where we need advanced help from professionals to train people in the market so that they cope up with our system.   

For finance, we need support to understand the different ways of raising capital. We can add sponsorship from big corporations & brands. We need professional support in terms of how to raise capital differently. 

In business development we need to figure out distribution channels. and value-added services, so we can really expand the business. 

Technology & public relations: we want to build more partnerships and we have a strong network, but we need help to figure out how to tap into the network network better. With technology, we want to bring in more and more automation in the process. So we can reduce the cost of operation and increase the operating margin. With public relations, we have a strong Network already. We need help in understanding and tapping into that Network and utilizing the full potential of that Network in. It is always possible to include meaningful Partnerships and collaborations.

We would like to collaborate with university faculties and research institutes such as MIT, MIT Education, Media Lab and such, because these will help us to perfect our model a lot and, because we have a very new and innovative model, it can be researched and tested out and validated. This will really increase our credibility all across the globe and help us in the path to revolutionize the education system. We need a lot of the top level researchers, educators, innovators and technologists to come forward and join us. In order to bring this revolution. 

We also need support and collaborations with institutes across the globe. So that we can impact more children's lives. Also need to collaborate with nonprofit organizations, which fund education initiatives across the globe so that we can reach out to the underserved Community as well. Who are unable to pay for this highly sophisticated model of Gamified Education.

We have been teaching high-end STEM education to the kids of aged 8 to 16, and most of them are girls. They have been showing tremendous enthusiasm and we believe that we are empowering the future women STEM